CarMax puts customers first with car research tools powered by Azure OpenAI Service

Disrupting the used car industry

Many companies claim to be industry disrupters, but few have been as successful at reshaping an industry as CarMax. The company has transformed the process of buying a used car, and as a result is now the United States’ largest retailer of pre-owned vehicles.

The success of CarMax is due in large part to the company’s focus on the needs of its customers and its constant push toward innovation—CarMax never stops imagining new ways to make the process of buying a used car hassle-free and enjoyable. Customers can buy a car on their own terms, whether online, in store, or through a seamless combination of both. CarMax has sold more than 11 million vehicles since the company’s founding in 1993.

“We started our business by disrupting an industry that a lot of people hated to deal with, and we brought integrity and trust and transparency to that industry,” says Shamim Mohammad, Executive Vice President and Chief Information and Technology Officer at CarMax.

With a nationwide reach and more than 45,000 cars available at any given time, helping customers do their pre-purchase research to find exactly what they need is a priority. Internet search engine results must surface what customers are looking for, and the CarMax website must have details on all inventory, plus sales tools for accurate vehicle comparisons, relevant model year feature summaries, and reviews from other customers. 

To help the CarMax content team organize, publish, and update this huge amount of data and information, CarMax turned to an AI-based solution.

Choosing an AI platform to power car buying research

CarMax chose to work with the cloud-based OpenAI API, which provides access to large-scale models such as GPT-3, Codex, and embeddings. With these models, that have been pretrained with trillions of words, users can build solutions for a wide variety of use cases, such as writing assistance, code generation, and reasoning over data.

To scale deployment across its huge inventory, CarMax chose to move its OpenAI work to Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service. Using OpenAI Service, gives CarMax access to built-in Responsible AI and the enterprise-grade capabilities such as security, compliance, and regional availability that comes with Microsoft Azure.

“Security is paramount for us, because we value our customers and want to protect them,” says Mohammad. “We’ve been Azure users for a while and we’re very comfortable with the level of protection it provides and the support we get. We also wanted to ensure that any service we use provides Responsible AI capabilities so that it doesn’t do anything counter to our core values as a company.”

Moving its development from OpenAI to OpenAI Service proved to be one of the most straightforward steps in the CarMax AI journey. “It was almost comically easy,” says Kevin Hopwood, Cloud Solutions Architect at CarMax. “We just changed an endpoint, and everything continued working. There was no learning curve and we continued work without skipping a beat.”

Creating more customer-relevant content

Azure OpenAI Service also helps CarMax produce content for its car research webpages. For example, the 2018 Kia Sorento page contains several sections of AI-generated text, including the “New this year” and “2018 Kia Sorento trims” sections, the related article summary, and a two-sentences summary of customer reviews.

The review summary was the first piece of content CarMax chose to generate through OpenAI Service. “Today, more and more customers are concerned with what their peers are saying, so they want to read reviews, but there could be thousands of them for a particular car,” says Sean Goetz, Director, Application Systems at CarMax. “With OpenAI Service, we can summarize all those reviews into a few easily readable sentences, at scale across our inventory.”

After OpenAI Service creates a piece of content, a CarMax staff member reviews the text to ensure that it makes sense in context and fits in with the CarMax brand voice. So far, the results have exceeded expectations. “Our initial goal was customer review summaries for 5,000 car pages, and we figured that using our existing manual process it would have taken about 11 years of content generation,” says Goetz. “With OpenAI Service, we hit that goal in just a few months, and the quality was even better than we anticipated after a little fine tuning, with an 80 percent editorial review approval rate.”

Compared to the company’s initial work with just the OpenAI API, CarMax has found that using OpenAI Service provides a variety of benefits. “The biggest is the ability to manage those deployments.” says Hopwood. “And it’s easy for us to scale out a custom model, deploy it, run our language tasks against it, and then dispose of it. That's very appealing. OpenAI Service provides big cost and time savings.”

Disrupting the used car industry again

In the end, it all comes back to the customer and the employees who assist them. “We’re equipping our customers and our associates with all necessary information so customers can feel confident and make the best possible decision at every step of the purchase journey,” says Mohammad. “With the help of OpenAI Service, we’re disrupting our industry for a second time by delivering cutting-edge digital tools and capabilities and becoming a true omnichannel retailer.”

With OpenAI Service, CarMax is creating content for its website much more efficiently, freeing up its editorial staff to focus on producing strategic, longer-form pieces that require more insight. “Our content creators do a very good job, and we want them to know they’re adding value,” says Mohammad. “Letting OpenAI Service take care of data-heavy summarization tasks gives them time to do be more creative and feel more fulfilled.” 

By generating meaningful content with appropriate keywords that customers find helpful, CarMax is boosting its search engine rankings, driving even more traffic to its website. “Our search engine numbers are all trending upward,” says Goetz. “OpenAI Service is playing a big part in our SEO improvement.”

Based on its success so far, CarMax is looking at bringing new use cases to OpenAI Service, such as generated text for car comparisons. “We already know that some cars are similar to a Ford Mustang, but what if we could provide a few sentences that explain the similarities and differences?” asks Hopwood. “That’s one of our new projects.”

Beyond the existing capabilities of OpenAI Service, CarMax sees its relationship with Microsoft as a natural fit between highly innovative companies. “Innovation happens at a rapid pace, so I wanted to make sure we teamed up with a company that never stands still, and constantly brings new ideas into the platform,” says Mohammad. “I want us to be the most innovative company in our industry, and I trust Microsoft will keep providing the tools we need to do that.”

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