CES 2026: Ford Is Launching Its Own AI Assistant
Listen up, Ford drivers: you’re getting a new AI assistant this year. In a decidedly low-key keynote at CES, the company announced Ford AI Assistant, a new AI-powered robot that will be available to Ford customers in early 2026.
Although the company plans to integrate the assistant directly into Ford vehicles, that’s not how you’ll experience this new AI for the first time. Instead, Ford is first rolling out Ford AI Assistant on an enhanced version of its Ford app and plans to ship cars with the assistant built-in sometime in 2027. Indeed, Ford has added a proprietary version of ChatGPT or Gemini to its app.
How Ford AI Assistant works
Ford’s idea here is to offer users an intelligent assistant experience directly linked to their Ford vehicle. In one example, the company suggests that a customer could go to a hardware store to purchase mulch. This customer might take a photo of a pile of mulch bags and ask the helper, “How many bags can I fit in the bed of my truck?” Ford AI Assistant could then crunch the numbers and come up with an informed estimate of how much mulch the customer can buy and take with them at one time.
Of course, other AI assistants can perform similar calculations. Send ChatGPT the same photo and ask the same question (specifying your truck model) and the bot will run the numbers itself. The difference, according to Ford, is that Ford AI Assistant is specifically connected to your vehicle. It can read all the sensors in your car and thus know, for example, how many people are currently traveling with you, the current pressure in your tires or, really, everything about your car. According to Doug Field, director of electric vehicles, digital and design at Ford, the company’s goal with the assistant is to offer answers that customers can’t get from other sources. ChatGPT certainly doesn’t have access to all of your built-in sensors in your car, so Ford has the advantage there.
However, Ford didn’t build its AI technology from scratch. The company tells TechCrunch that Ford AI Assistant is hosted by Google Cloud and works using “commercially available LLMs.” Still, this probably won’t have much of an impact on whether or not customers use this new assistant. Instead, it will depend on how useful they find the AI assistant in the app.
What do you think of it so far?
Will Ford AI Assistant really be useful?
As someone who rarely uses AI assistants, I imagine it would be of little use to me if I owned a Ford. That being said, sometimes it can be useful to have external access to your car’s information. I could probably see how many bags of mulch would fit in my trunk, but I can’t give you the exact reading of my odometer without starting my car. The same goes for my tire pressure: It would be helpful to know my tire pressure before I get in my car, to know if I should head to a place where I can fill up before heading to my destination.
Of course, there’s also a privacy discussion to be had here. Modern cars are already privacy nightmares, but there’s something a little annoying about an AI assistant that knows All about my car.
