Driving the future of car buying with agentic AI

At Capital One, we’re always finding ways to leverage technology that enhances the customer experience, and that’s no less true for the car buying experience. When it comes to big financial milestones like buying a car, we see a great opportunity to offer a more frictionless, satisfying experience for consumers. Insights from the latest Capital One Car Buying Outlook show that car buyers value transparency and ease in the process. And at the same time, auto dealers are looking for new and innovative ways to grow their businesses to connect deeply with car buyers.

As our teams analyzed this problem statement, we aimed to bridge this gap and thoughtfully apply AI to this process to help transfer the cognitive burden from the human to the system to enable more satisfying experiences for both car buyers and dealers alike. 

Enter Chat Concierge, our new – and first – proprietary multi-agentic conversational AI assistant designed to accelerate and enhance the auto-buying experience. Chat Concierge helps streamline the car buying experience by not just providing information, but taking action based on consumers’ preferences and requests. In a single conversation, Chat Concierge can perform tasks like comparing vehicles to help car buyers find the best choice for them and scheduling appointments with a sales team. We developed Chat Concierge leveraging Meta’s open source Llama model as a base, which we customized with our proprietary data to meet our high performance, risk, and governance thresholds.

We took a balanced and well-managed approach to test, learn, and adapt our AI-driven technology to create the multi-agentic AI workflow that powers Chat Concierge. Composed of multiple logical agents, these agents effectively work together to mimic human reasoning. This means that they don’t just simply provide information to the car buyer, but rather, they take specific actions based on the car buyer’s preferences and needs. Together, these agents work to understand natural language prompts, come up with an action plan to execute on those prompts, validate that plan to mitigate against hallucination and errors, and explain the information and the plan to the car buyer.

For example, if a car buyer says they are looking to upgrade their vehicle, Chat Concierge will ask probing questions to identify if they're interested in a particular year, make, or model. The car buyer can explore vehicle features and inventory, and when they're ready for a test drive, Chat Concierge will:

• Confirm with the car buyer the vehicle they want to test drive and make a plan to schedule a test drive.

• Check for hallucinations or errors.

• Simulate the execution of the action plan and determine if the outcome conforms to the policies and business rules. 

• Generate and deliver a natural language detailed explanation of the plan to the customer.

• Helps streamline communication between car buyers and dealers.
• Car buyers can ask questions and receive personalized, tailored answers without committing personal information upfront
• Can perform tasks like comparing vehicles to helping car buyers decide on the best vehicle choice for them and scheduling appointments with salespeople.
• Takes action based on the car buyer’s needs and requests, offering a more frictionless, satisfying shopping experience.

• Car buyers browsing a participating dealer’s website can use Chat Concierge to compare vehicles and schedule test drives, all without leaving the page.

• Enables participating dealers to connect car buyers on their terms, directly through their dealer websites, in Navigator Platform and in dealer’s CRMs. 

• Centralizes the car buyer experience on the dealer’s website, while seamlessly integrating the car buyer’s provided information in the dealer’s CRM/tool stack. 

• Works with dealer CRMs, supporting both Capital One and non-Capital One products.

As we continue to thoughtfully embed AI throughout our business with proprietary solutions, there is great potential for new approaches like multi-agentic AI. Delve into our AI research to discover how this technology is paving the way for creating more satisfying and seamless experiences for our millions of customers.

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