General Motors is adding a personal AI assistant to OnStar, the subscription connected-car service it launched 30 years ago, the company said on Wednesday, October 21 at its GM Forward event in New York. The OnStar AI Assistant will debut in the 2027 Cadillac Lyriq EV in the coming months, with more GM vehicles to follow, and a new OnStar mobile app will arrive in 2027 alongside it.
The makeover puts agentic AI at the centre of a service drivers have historically known as a call centre for emergencies and roadside help. GM is building the assistant in-house, after years in which the conversational experience in its cars leaned on Google technology.
What The OnStar AI Assistant Does
“OnStar is now transitioning to be a connected intelligence platform, not just the call centre that it’s historically been known as, but a mechanism for interpreting, understanding, and providing predictive, proactive support to its owners,” GM’s vice president of global product and chief product officer, Sterling Anderson, told TechCrunch in an interview ahead of the event. The assistant is aimed at giving drivers and passengers an interactive, personalised experience that extends beyond the trip itself.
In practice, that means voice control over vehicle functions such as climate, spoken answers to questions about specific vehicle features, and camera features tied to the app. Owners will be able to view live video from the vehicle’s cameras as well as crash and safety recordings, and can set the cameras to switch on automatically when the car senses an event such as an aggressive horn honk, then upload the clip to the OnStar app. Reporting from the event also describes proactive alerts built from vehicle signals, weather, road conditions and route information.
The new OnStar mobile app will sync with the in-car software. When it launches in 2027 it will replace both the OnStar Guardian app, which dates to 2020, and the separate brand apps for Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet and GMC — one app and one assistant across the whole GM range.
Built In-House, After Years Of Google AI In The Car
The assistant is an in-house effort, and that is the strategic shift in the announcement. GM began using Google Cloud’s conversational AI Dialogflow in 2022 to recognise specific spoken requests, expanded it in 2023 to answer common queries such as routing and navigation, and said last year that Google Gemini would roll out in vehicles in 2026. The Free Press, reporting from the same event, notes that Gemini will still be an AI assistant option in GM vehicles; OnStar AI is GM’s own layer on top of that history, not a clean break from it.
The move also lands in a newly crowded space. Google has just brought Gemini Personal Intelligence to cars on Android Auto, as we reported in Google’s rollout of Gemini Personal Intelligence to cars, which means the assistant in a GM car is now a contested surface: the carmaker’s own agent, or the phone platform’s. GM’s answer is to own the assistant, the app and the subscription relationship, in line with the $25 billion subscription business by 2030 that the company has previously targeted for OnStar.
The Data Question Follows The Assistant Into The Car
An always-listening, camera-connected assistant raises the data question immediately, and GM addressed it at the event. Earlier this year the Federal Trade Commission finalised an order that bans GM and OnStar from sharing certain consumer data with consumer reporting agencies, and requires the automaker to be more transparent and obtain explicit consent for certain data collection.
GM said customers will decide what data is shared, that recordings have time limits and are encrypted, and that neither GM nor OnStar can access Connected Camera recordings. Third-party sharing is feature-specific and consent-based, customers can manage permissions and withdraw consent, though declining some sharing may limit the related features.
Why It Matters
OnStar’s AI assistant matters because the car is becoming one of the main places people meet an AI agent, and who provides that agent decides who owns the customer. If the assistant is Google’s, the relationship, the data and the subscription sit with Google; by building its own, GM keeps all three, across millions of vehicles and four brands, and turns a safety service into a daily-use product. That is the same contest playing out across the agent platforms covered in our guide to the agent platforms to know in 2026. For drivers, the test is simpler — whether the assistant is useful enough, and its data practices clear enough, to keep the subscription paid, the open question our explainer on what AI agents are keeps returning to.
Background
OnStar launched in 1996 as a subscription safety service built around a live voice at the press of a button, and GM has rebuilt it several times since: the Guardian app took it beyond GM vehicles in 2021, Google-powered conversational features arrived from 2022, and a Gemini rollout was promised for 2026. The AI Assistant is the first version of OnStar designed around an agent rather than a call centre.
Source: TechCrunch, Detroit Free Press
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