Ford unveils AI assistant, Level 3 roadmap

Ford announced at CES that an AI-powered voice assistant will begin rolling out to customers this year, with the assistant appearing on Ford and Lincoln mobile apps in 2026 and expanding into the in-car experience in 2027. The assistant will be chatbot-agnostic — Ford plans to integrate Google’s Gemini while allowing other large language models access — and will be able to use vehicle-specific data (for example, a photo of mulch plus truck-bed specs) to give more accurate, context-aware answers than general-purpose chatbots. Doug Field, Ford’s chief officer for EVs and software, framed the effort as a push to make these features affordable by building much of the necessary software and hardware in-house rather than vertically racing on custom chips or proprietary LLMs.

On autonomy, Ford said its Universal Electric Vehicle (UEV) platform (launching in 2027) will underpin new hands‑free capabilities, with a point‑to‑point hands‑free system and a planned Level 3, eyes‑off feature arriving in 2028 for certain conditions. Ford says its reworked computing architecture yields a hands‑free system roughly 30% lower in cost and a compute module about 44% smaller than current units. The company has incorporated expertise from the former Argo AI team and BlackBerry engineers, and emphasizes balancing performance, cost, and size rather than chasing raw TOPS benchmarks.

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