General Motors is turning OnStar, its 30-year-old connected car service, into a personal AI helper. The OnStar AI Assistant was announced on 21 October at GM's GM Forward event in New York, and GM says it will arrive first in the 2027 Cadillac Lyriq through an over-the-air update "in the coming months", with other GM vehicles to follow.
The plan goes well beyond a talking dashboard. GM is also replacing its separate Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet and GMC apps with a single OnStar app in 2027, adding connected cameras that can record incidents, and pitching the assistant as something that lives on your phone and in the cloud as well as in the car.
What the OnStar AI Assistant does
According to GM's announcement, the assistant is trained on the company's vehicle knowledge and gives drivers personalised guidance on how to get more from their cars. Human OnStar advisers stay in the loop: GM says they will complement the AI rather than disappear, and owners can still call a live representative.
Speaking to The Drive, GM chief product officer Sterling Anderson described a much broader role. "The intelligence of OnStar will exist everywhere," he said, listing the car, the phone, the cloud and GM's fleet management software. He also told TechCrunch that "OnStar is now transitioning to be a connected intelligence platform, not just the call center."
The examples GM gave show what that means in practice:
- Voice control: drivers and passengers can ask about vehicle features and control some functions, including climate, by voice, TechCrunch reports.
- Proactive alerts: the assistant can send alerts and guidance based on vehicle signals, weather, road conditions, route information and your calendar, according to The Drive.
- Errands that move with you: in Anderson's example, if you are running late for a child's football practice, the car would check your partner's location and your grocery pickup slot, reschedule the pickup and tell the people affected.
- Connected cameras: cameras can record crashes and safety events and offer a live view. An aggressive horn honk, for example, can trigger recording, with the footage uploaded to the app and an alert sent to the owner.
Anderson told The Drive that the assistant has to learn a driver's preferences and goals before it can be truly personal. That learning is also where most of the privacy questions sit.
When and where you can get it
The first car is the 2027 Cadillac Lyriq electric SUV. GM says more models will follow, and Anna Santos, GM's director of product management for voice and vehicle AI, told The Drive the assistant should also work on some earlier GM models, with the aim of rolling it out wherever possible. Upcoming models named include the new petrol-powered Chevrolet Silverado 1500 and GMC Sierra 1500.
The phone side comes later. Starting in 2027, a new OnStar app will bring the assistant to smartphones and replace the OnStar Guardian app and the four brand apps. GM says it will group vehicles from all its brands in one place, along with connected camera features such as crash recordings and live view.
Two things are missing from the announcement:
- Price. Neither GM's release nor the coverage gives a subscription price for the assistant or the camera features.
- Markets. OnStar has more than 12 million subscribers across 22 markets, GM says, but the company has not said which countries get the AI assistant first. Readers in Africa should not expect it soon: GM has not announced any African launch.
The privacy promises
GM has a history here. TechCrunch notes the carmaker has previously been criticised and fined over sharing driver data with third parties, which is why the privacy section of this launch matters more than the feature list.
GM says customers decide which features are switched on and can change those choices or turn features off at any time. Anderson told The Drive that data is encrypted end to end and can be accessed and shared only by the owner. GM also told TechCrunch that camera recordings have time limits, are encrypted, and cannot be accessed by GM or OnStar.
Owners are promised settings that show what each feature uses, why, when it is active and how the data is handled, with controls for cameras, microphones, location and AI permissions. Those settings were not shown at the event, so the real test will come when the Lyriq update ships.
The idea of an assistant that watches your calendar and acts before you ask is the same direction other AI companies are taking. Anthropic's background agent, which we explained in Claude Duet explained, also checks your accounts and pings you only when something needs attention. GM is applying that model to a car on a public road.
Why GM is doing this
Money is part of the answer. TechCrunch reports that the OnStar changes are part of GM's plan to build a $25 billion subscription business by 2030. A more useful assistant gives owners a reason to keep paying for connected services after the free trial ends.
It is also a change of direction on the technology. GM began using Google Cloud's Dialogflow in 2022 and said in 2025 that Google's Gemini would roll out in its vehicles in 2026, TechCrunch notes. The OnStar AI Assistant is described as an in-house GM effort, and neither GM nor the coverage names the underlying model. The Drive reports that the Lyriq's infotainment system runs on a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, used in many other GM electric vehicles.
The assistant is one piece of a wider AI push GM laid out at the same event. The company says it wants to halve its usual four-to-five-year vehicle development time, that it tested more than 300,000 battery designs virtually before building a physical prototype for its lithium manganese rich cells, and that autonomous highway driving will debut on the Cadillac Escalade IQ in 2028.
What to watch next
- The Lyriq over-the-air update date, and whether the assistant is free or part of a paid OnStar plan.
- Which model powers it, and whether any data leaves GM's own systems.
- Whether the privacy settings GM described appear in the first release.
- Which countries outside the US are next.
For now, the OnStar AI Assistant is a promise for one Cadillac model in the coming months. If GM delivers the privacy controls it described, it could become the template for how carmakers sell AI to drivers who are wary of being watched.
