Cars24 Kills Job Titles: Inside Its Radical 'Flatland' Restructuring

Cars24 has taken the unusual step of eliminating job titles, grades and organisational bands across its entire workforce, joining a small group of global tech firms dismantling traditional corporate hierarchy at scale.

Under a new operating philosophy, which the company calls Flatland, every employee, regardless of seniority, will now carry a single designation: Builder, as per a report by The Economic Times (ET).

The Gurugram-based company said the move is part of a broader effort to reshape itself for an AI-driven future. The underlying idea is that authority should flow from ownership, execution and impact on customers, not from formal rank in an organisation chart.

What Does The Founder Say

Cars24 co-founder Vikram Chopra framed the shift as a response to how AI is changing the value of information itself. Hierarchy, he said, was built for an era when knowledge was scarce and organisations needed layered structures to move decisions through the system.

"Hierarchy was one of humanity's greatest inventions," stated Chopra, as per ET.

That logic, he argued, no longer holds now that intelligence and context are widely accessible, so the job of an organisation shifts from routing decisions up and down levels to helping capable people tackle hard problems together.

Chopra characterised the decision as a readiness to challenge long-standing assumptions about how companies are traditionally organised, arguing that each generation inherits at least one convention that deserves to be re-examined.

He said Cars24 sees this particular norm as theirs to scrutinise, even though they have not yet fully defined a replacement. "Every generation gets to question one assumption that previous generations took for granted," Chopra said.

What Actually Changes

In practical terms, employees will no longer be defined by rank but by the problems they own and the outcomes they deliver. Leadership, per the company, will now be a function of judgement and execution rather than title, meaning ideas get evaluated on merit, whether they come from a founder or a brand-new hire.

The overhaul extends beyond job titles into HR systems as well. Benefits, travel policies, reimbursements and IT asset allocation will no longer be tied to hierarchical grades, and new hires won't be slotted into levels when they join.

Cars24 says the rollout has happened in phases over several months, starting with senior leadership before extending company-wide. Importantly, the company maintains that accountability, performance expectations and decision-making responsibility remain clearly defined. It's only the basis of authority — from position to ownership — that has changed.

Chopra was careful to temper expectations about what removing titles alone can achieve, noting that culture stems from behaviour rather than structure. Flatland, in his framing, simply removes the excuse of rank as a stand-in for actual contribution, so that whoever is closest to a problem feels empowered to solve it regardless of tenure or entry point.

The Business Case Behind It

Cars24 says the restructuring follows an 18-month redesign of its operating model, which it credits with lifting revenue per employee by 50% year-on-year in the second half of FY26, while adding close to 300 basis points to EBITDA margins without a proportional rise in operating costs.

The company, which operates across India, the UAE and Australia, says it now serves over 41 million monthly active users and turned profitable globally this year. Cars24 frames Flatland as the first step in a larger belief: that companies succeeding in the AI era will need to fundamentally rethink organisational design, not simply bolt AI onto existing corporate structures.