Capital One’s new AI agent will help you buy your next car

Capital One has launched an AI agent designed to help consumers with one of the most frustrating, time-consuming processes in life: buying a car. 

The banking giant’s Chat Concierge provides information, makes decisions, and takes action using multiple AI agents. Mimicking human reasoning, the product aims to assist consumers in all aspects of the research process involved in making a car purchase, from comparing vehicles to scheduling test drives. 

“Buying a car is a stressful experience,” says Prem Natarajan, EVP, chief scientist, and head of enterprise AI at Capital One. “The possibility that we can make this really important purchase for people a frictionless experience, a more satisfying experience, a more easy experience is important.”

The company is a major provider of auto loans, and already offers Dealer Navigator, a platform that provides car buyers and dealers with resources for the research, sale, and financing processes.

Capital One’s new agent comes amid a wave of buzz around agentic AI, with many experts calling it “the way of the future.” Agentic AI can be “magical” for users because it shifts the purpose of artificial intelligence from being a general tool to performing specialized tasks, Natarajan says.

In recent weeks, Google and OpenAI have announced their own agentic features that can browse the web and perform tasks on behalf of users. Instacart also recently announced that it would integrate agentic AI to create grocery lists and place orders on customers’ behalf. 

“Our journey into agentic AI started before it was being talked about,” Natarajan says. “The only way you’re part of any trend is if you were in the early part of shaping it.”

The Chat Concierge, which users will find on participating dealers’ websites, orchestrates task completion among multiple specialized AI agents. Capital One will scale up the feature nationwide throughout the year.

Customers who walk into a car dealership with lots of questions often can’t find one employee who is able to address all of them. If a customer goes the online route, a typical chatbot will likely take their name and phone number and say that someone will get back to them. 

Sanjiv Yajnik, president of financial services at Capital One, says Chat Concierge is different because it starts conversing with a customer immediately about any question they might have. In a single conversation, the agent can perform tasks like estimating the value of a trade-in and scheduling appointments with salespeople.

“It can look at the inventory and answer a whole bunch of questions,” says Yajnik. For example, if a user tells Chat Concierge that they want a “cheaper” car, the system understands what cheaper means, what to compare it to, and what to offer the user. 

Chat Concierge uses Meta’s Llama AI as a base, but it’s not out of the box—Capital One has customized the model with its own data.

Natarajan and Yajnik say they hope that this system will allow people to enjoy the car-buying process that many find overwhelming. The main goal of Chat Concierge is shifting some of the “cognitive burden” of the job from humans to AI, Natarajan says. And if Capital One’s agent helps more people buy vehicles—well, that will presumably be good for the company’s loan business.

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