GM is building its own in-vehicle AI assistant because Google's Gemini cannot access what the car knows

TL;DRGM will launch a proprietary AI assistant later this year that goes beyond Gemini by integrating with OnStar, vehicle telemetry, and predictive maintenance. Unnamed LLM provider. Gemini stays.

General Motors will launch its own in-vehicle AI assistant later this year, built to access vehicle data that Google’s Gemini cannot reach. The system will integrate with OnStar, GM’s telemetry systems, and proprietary vehicle knowledge to offer predictive maintenance, real-time diagnostics, and auto-specific commands that a general-purpose assistant cannot provide. GM is working with an unnamed large language model provider on the technology.

“There’s a limit to what an AI that’s just sort of sitting at the top level of the vehicle can do,” said Anna Santos, GM’s director of product management for voice and AI. Gemini launched in eligible 2022 and newer GM vehicles earlier this year and handles conversational queries, temperature, and radio controls. The new GM assistant goes deeper: it will understand the vehicle’s mechanical state, driving patterns, and owner preferences. Santos described a “kids setting” command that would adjust music, seats, climate, and door locks simultaneously.

The distinction matters commercially. Gemini operates like a phone assistant projected onto the dashboard. GM’s proprietary system uses data that belongs to GM, not Google. “It’s data that’s going to be proprietary to GM,” Santos said. Google has been embedding AI across every product it controls, and GM’s decision to build a parallel system rather than hand all vehicle intelligence to Gemini reflects the same concern Nadella raised about companies outsourcing their thinking to a single AI provider.