CES 2026: Ford Is Launching Its Own AI Assistant

Listen up, Ford drivers: You're getting a new AI assistant this year. During a decidedly low-key CES keynote, the company announced Ford AI Assistant, a new AI-powered bot coming to Ford customers in the early half of 2026.

While the company has plans to integrate the assistant into Ford vehicles directly, that isn't how you'll first experience this new AI. Instead, Ford is rolling out Ford AI Assistant to an upgraded version of its Ford app first, and plans on shipping cars with the assistant built-in sometime in 2027. In effect, 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 a smart assistant experience directly tied to their Ford vehicle. In one example, the company suggests a customer could visit a hardware store looking to buy mulch. Said customer could take a photo of a pile of bags of mulch, and ask the assistant "how many bags can I fit in the bed of my truck?" Ford AI Assistant could then run the numbers, and offer an educated estimate to how much mulch the customer can buy and take with them at one time.

Of course, other AI assistants can do similar calculations. Send ChatGPT the same photo, and ask the same question—specifying the model of your truck—and the bot will run the numbers itself. The difference, in Ford's view, is that Ford AI Assistant is connected to your vehicle specifically. It can read all the sensors in your car, so it knows, for example, how many people are currently traveling with you, your current tire pressure, or, really, anything and everything about your car. According to Doug Field, Ford's Chief Officer of EVs, Digital, and Design, the company's goal with the assistant is to offer answers customers can't get from other sources. ChatGPT certainly doesn't have access to your every sensor embedded in your car, so Ford does have the advantage there.

Ford didn't go out and build its AI tech by scratch, however. The company tells TechCrunch that Ford AI Assistant is hosted by Google Cloud, and is run using "off-the-shelf LLMs." Still, that likely won't have much of an impact on whether or not customers use this new assistant. Instead, that will come down to how useful they find the AI assistant in the app.

Will Ford AI Assistant actually be useful?

As someone who rarely uses AI assistants, I'd imagine I'd find little use for it if I owned a Ford. That being said, there are some times when it could genuinely be useful to have external access to your car's information. I could probably eyeball how many bags of mulch would fit in my trunk, but I can't tell you my exact odometer reading without starting up my car. The same goes for my tire pressure: It'd be helpful to know my tire pressure before getting in my car, to know whether I should be headed somewhere I can fill up before going 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 bit unnerving about an AI assistant that knows everything about my car.