Ford is throwing its hat into the ring alongside Rivian and making an AI companion in-house

• Ford announced it's making a new AI assistant for its cars.
• It will help drivers answer specific questions, such as how much firewood can fit into their trucks.
• The assistant will be available via mobile app in 2026 and will be integrated into vehicles in 2027.

Ford will be launching an AI assistant to help its drivers with everyday problems.

Ford announced on Wednesday that it would introduce the first chapter of its new AI assistant to customers through the Ford mobile app in the first half of the year.

The assistant is billed as a "deep, personalized intelligence that knows your specific vehicle, understands your unique needs, and anticipates your desires on every journey," per Ford's press release.

Sammy Omari, the head of Ford's Advanced Driver Assist Systems (ADAS), told Business Insider that the fastest way to get the AI agent in the hands of its customer base is through the Ford and Lincoln mobile apps, which many of its customers already use.

Omari said the next step would come in 2027.

"And then in '27, we are actually going to launch that in vehicle and then scale that across our vehicles," he said.

Omari said that Ford would not be developing its own LLM for the AI assistant.

We're not going to be directly competing with a Google or an OpenAI or a Meta," he said. "But what we do do is we take an LLM that's available and then basically make it our own by giving it access to all the relevant information about the person's vehicle."

Rivian, a California-headquartered EV manufacturer, announced a similar AI assistant for its cars in December.

The company said it would launch a "next-generation voice interface" in early 2026 on its Gen 1 and Gen 2 R1 vehicles.

A demonstration of the AI assistant, seen by Business Insider, showed that it could understand commands said in natural language, such as "Can you make it a little bit colder for everyone in the cabin?"

Ford's announcement was released amid a raft of hot auto industry news coming out of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2026, an annual tech trade show happening in Las Vegas.

Amazon-backed robotaxi company Zoox gave live demonstrations during the conference. Uber unveiled the design of its first robotaxi, made in collaboration with Lucid and autonomous driving startup Nuro.

Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang also announced Alpamayo, a new open AI model for autonomous vehicles.