An AI agent could help you buy your next car

Capital One has launched an AI agent designed to help customers with one of the more difficult and confusing purchase decisions: buying a car.

The new chatbot, called Chat Concierge, will help customers with everything from researching vehicles and scheduling test drives, to exploring financing options. The generative AI-powered assistant, one of many such projects at the financial institution, simplifies car buying by answering basic questions online with no dealership visit needed. It then directs them to existing online services.

Although Capital One’s auto loans are its smallest loan business, they still account for about 28% of its business, or $75 billion.

Chat Concierge is considered a customer service chatbot — a generative AI (genAI) automation tool that can handle simple user questions. The new service stands in contrast to Capital One’s own study last fall that found the in-person dealership experience remains vital for car buyers, even when they use digital tools to streamline early stages of the process. The report showed 88% of car buyers conduct at least half of the car buying process in person; 60% of buyers said sales reps contribute to trust.

“Car buyers’ trust in dealers is a key indicator of how transparent they perceive the car buying process — even with access to digital tools to complete key elements of their purchase,” the study concluded.

Even so, Sanjiv Yajnik, president of Financial Services at Capital One, said Chat Concierge will drive the future of car buying. “By leveraging our own internally developed AI tools to provide personalized, efficient, and transparent interactions, Capital One is reimagining car buying and setting a new standard for customer experience in the automotive industry,” Yajnik said in a statement.

Capital One’s AI assistant is part of a larger trend of companies deploying AI agents to tackle tasks often performed by entry-level employees, or to create efficiencies for high-level workers.

In the simplest sense, an AI agent is the combination of a large language model (LLM) and a traditional software application that can act independently to complete a task. The most basic AI agents include Chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s CoPilot, and Google Bard; they can answer user questions on a myriad of topics. AI agents can also act as spam filters, such as email spam detectors that use keyword matching and smart devices such as Thermostats that can follow set rules for raising or lowering temperature based on environmental conditions.

As AI-powered agents improve, they enable more personalized and effective customer service than early chatbots could deliver. Banks are using the genAI tools to resolve complex issues, setting new standards for efficiency. By leveraging customer data, AI assistants provide 24/7 support, handling thousands of inquiries at once, according to Arthur O’Connor, academic director of data science at the City University of New York (CUNY) School of Professional Studies.

“One of the most interesting developments is emotion recognition (ER), an emerging technology enabling chat bots to detect and respond to customer emotions, allowing for more empathetic and effective interactions, and thus engender customer satisfaction and loyalty,” O’Connor said.

Last month, Google DeepMind announced Project Astra, a research initiative aimed at developing a universal AI assistant that can process text, images, video, and audio inputs, enabling more natural and context-aware interactions. A key feature of Project Astra is its multimodal capabilities, allowing users to engage through various means such as speaking, showing images, or sharing videos. The assistant can remember details from past conversations and utilize tools such as Google Search, Maps, and Lens to provide informed responses.

The US Airforce recently announced it’s experimenting with a chatbot called NIPRGPT that will allow service members to engage in human-like conversations to complete various tasks, including drafting correspondence, preparing background papers, and assisting with coding.

Many AI agents will be integrated into existing software applications without users even knowing it. For example, Google Maps Navigation uses an AI model combined with traffic data and predicted conditions to provide the best route for drivers. Virtual Personal Assistants, such as Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, or Google Assistant, use agents to predict user needs.

There are also learning AI agents whose algorithms are sophisticated enough to improve performance based on past experiences. Those systems include consumer recommendation services used on Netflix, Spotify, and YouTube, which all rely on AI to learn user preferences.

Agents that can become “smarter” include DeepMind’s AlphaGo, which learns and adapts to play the boardgame Go at a superhuman level.

Capital One’s Chat Concierge uses multiple AI agents that collaborate to mimic human reasoning. Instead of just providing information, the agents take action based on the user’s requests. They understand natural language, create action plans, validate them to avoid mistakes, and explain everything to the user, according to the bank.

For example, if a buyer asks for a list of trucks and then requests a test drive of the least expensive option, Chat Concierge can handle both tasks seamlessly. Concierge will also:

Simulate and validate plans to ensure they meet the car buyer’s needs and business policies.

Generate and deliver clear, natural language explanations of all the steps to the car buyer.

Let car buyers explore financing without leaving the dealer’s website.

Connect buyers directly to dealers through dealer websites, a navigator platform, and customer relationship management (CRM) apps, integrating customer info into the dealer’s CRM.

Work seamlessly with both Capital One and non-Capital One products.

“Capital One has a long history of using data, technology, and analytics to deliver superior financial services products and services for millions of customers,” said Prem Natarajan, chief scientist and head of enterprise AI at Capital One. “The launch of Chat Concierge is a key milestone in our customer-centered AI journey as we continue to focus on solving some of the most challenging problems in finance with technology.”