When General Motors launched OnStar 30 years ago, it was a novel way to connect people to the internet while they were inside their cars: Press the button on the rearview mirror, and the system calls an OnStar agent who can see your location, give directions, and send out first responders in the event of a crash.
That was years before the first iPhone debuted. Today, most people carry smartphones that can give directions and detect crashes.
To go beyond those use cases, OnStar is now getting an upgrade for the AI age—one that turns it into more of a personal assistant.
“Hey OnStar, it’s getting warm in here,” you could say while driving. In response, the temperature in your vehicle’s cabin will automatically adjust, without you having to navigate your car’s touch screen. Say “It’s too dark in here,” and it will turn on the interior lights.
[Image: GM]
Or you might ask what that beeping you heard was, and it will explain if it was from a safety feature, like a sensor that alerts you if you’re close to another vehicle or going above the speed limit.
There’s still the opportunity to connect with a real person through OnStar, GM says, as the tool will be “complemented” by human support. If you tell OnStar you’re worried about a warning you saw on your dash, for example, it may ask if you want to connect to a live advisor.
“Proprietary connected intelligence”
OnStar AI Assistant will launch later this year in the 2027 Cadillac LYRIQ through an over-the-air update, before rolling out to more GM vehicles.
GM did integrate Google Gemini for a conversational AI experience into some of its vehicles earlier this year via a software upgrade, but the company says OnStar AI Assistant goes beyond Gemini’s capabilities.
“This is our proprietary connected intelligence,” Sterling Anderson, GM’s chief product officer, said at an event on Wednesday announcing the news. “It’s designed to anticipate your needs, to provide timely help, and to make every drive more personal.”
[Photo: GM]
Though it will leverage some power from general purpose LLMs, he added, it was developed internally, and trained on GM’s vehicles and sensor data. Then, it can adapt to become more personalized—based on the permissions and privacy controls you allow, GM says.
You’ll also be able to access OnStar AI via an app, which lets you plan road trips or ask more specific vehicle questions—like uploading a picture of a boat, and asking if your specific model could tow it.
“OnStar will become such an important and central part of our products that starting next summer, we’re going to unify all of our mobile apps under the OnStar name with intelligent AI capabilities built in,” Anderson said.
An AI assistant for every area of life
GM sees OnStar AI Assistant as a way to help drivers handle moments inside their vehicles: it can turn on dome lights or open the glove box without you pressing any buttons. It can give you real-time updates on your EV ’s range or your tire pressure, or surface information before you even think to ask, like your oil levels.
But GM also paints a picture of an AI assistant that integrates into all areas of your life, beyond your car.
Emily Bowman, director of vehicle interface design, gave a presentation on GM’s future visions for the technology. The AI could connect to your family calendar and confirm an appointment rescheduling, or figure out if your partner is closer to your child’s school, and send them a text to do pick up that day.
On your morning commute to the office, you could ask OnStar AI to pull up notes from a meeting, draft a summary, and send it through your email.
And on your drive home, you could ask it to launch “relax mode,” which could dim the lights, turn on the seat massager, and emit a relaxing fragrance into your car’s interior. (That feature would be coupled with GM’s autonomous driving technology, which the automaker is working to scale up and expand.)
You could even pair it with your smart home devices, asking it to turn on your house lights or open your garage door. Some of these features may come by 2029, Bowman said.
Others simply illustrate the direction GM says it’s heading: one, it seems, where your car is a personal assistant on wheels.
In one demo of the technology, Anna Santos, director of product management for voice and vehicle AI, asked OnStar for ideas for matching family Halloween costumes.
