GM Turns OnStar Into an AI Assistant, Starting With the 2027 Cadillac LYRIQ

General Motors will launch its OnStar AI Assistant later this year in the 2027 Cadillac LYRIQ through an over-the-air update, before rolling the system out to more GM vehicles.

The move amounts to a rebuild of a 30-year-old product. When GM introduced OnStar in the mid-1990s, it was novel: press a button on the rearview mirror and an agent could see your location, give directions, and dispatch first responders after a crash. That was years before the first iPhone. Today, most people carry a smartphone that handles both tasks, which is why GM is repositioning OnStar as a personal assistant rather than a concierge service.

The practical use cases are concrete. Say "Hey OnStar, it's getting warm in here" while driving, and the cabin temperature adjusts automatically—no touch-screen navigation required. Say "It's too dark in here," and the interior lights come on. Ask what that beeping sound was, and the system explains whether it came from a safety feature, such as a sensor warning you're close to another vehicle or over the speed limit.

Human support stays in the loop. GM says the AI tool will be "complemented" by live advisors—if you tell OnStar you're worried about a dashboard warning, it may offer to connect you to a real person.

How is this different from what GM already ships?

GM integrated Google Gemini for a conversational AI experience into some vehicles earlier this year via a software upgrade. The company says OnStar AI Assistant goes beyond Gemini's capabilities.

"This is our proprietary connected intelligence," Sterling Anderson, GM's chief product officer, said at an event on Wednesday announcing the news. "It's designed to anticipate your needs, to provide timely help, and to make every drive more personal."

Anderson said the system will leverage some power from general-purpose LLMs, but it was developed internally and trained on GM's own vehicles and sensor data. It then adapts to become more personalized, based on the permissions and privacy controls each driver allows.

An app will extend OnStar AI beyond the car. Users can plan road trips or ask specific vehicle questions—upload a photo of a boat, for instance, and ask whether their specific model can tow it.

The OnStar brand is also absorbing GM's broader software strategy. "OnStar will become such an important and central part of our products that starting next summer, we're going to unify all of our mobile apps under the OnStar name with intelligent AI capabilities built in," Anderson said.

What does this change for drivers?

Inside the vehicle, the assistant handles the small frictions of driving. It can turn on dome lights or open the glove box without buttons. It gives real-time updates on your EV's range and tire pressure, and surfaces information before you ask—like oil levels.

Emily Bowman, GM's director of vehicle interface design, presented a wider vision at the event. The AI could connect to your family calendar and confirm a rescheduled appointment, or determine whether your partner is closer to your child's school and text them to handle pickup that day.

On a morning commute, you could ask OnStar AI to pull up meeting notes, draft a summary, and send it through your email. On the drive home, you could launch "relax mode"—dimmed lights, a running seat massager, and a relaxing fragrance released into the cabin. That feature would pair with GM's autonomous driving technology, which the automaker is working to scale up and expand.

Smart-home integration is on the roadmap too: ask OnStar to turn on your house lights or open your garage door. Some of these features may arrive by 2029, Bowman said. Others simply illustrate the direction GM says it's heading—a future where the car functions as a personal assistant on wheels.

In one demo of the technology, Anna Santos, GM's director of product management for voice and vehicle AI, asked OnStar for ideas for matching family Halloween costumes.

For practitioners, the signal is clear: GM is betting that proprietary, vehicle-trained AI—coupled with a unified OnStar app ecosystem from next summer—can differentiate its software stack where a third-party model like Gemini could not.