Many companies aspire to be game-changers, but CarMax has genuinely redefined the used car industry. As the largest retailer of pre-owned vehicles in the United States, CarMax’s success stems from its commitment to transforming the used car buying experience. By prioritizing customer needs and embracing continuous innovation, CarMax empowers customers to navigate the car buying journey on their own terms, whether online, in-store, or through a seamless hybrid approach. Since its inception in 1993, CarMax has facilitated the sale of over 11 million vehicles, marking a significant shift in how people buy used cars.
“We disrupted an industry that was often disliked by customers by introducing integrity, trust, and transparency,” states Shamim Mohammad, Executive Vice President and Chief Information and Technology Officer at CarMax.
With a vast nationwide inventory of over 45,000 vehicles at any given time, providing customers with robust Car Research Tools is paramount. Ensuring that customers can easily find the information they need during their pre-purchase research is a key priority. This means optimizing internet search engine results to surface relevant information and equipping the CarMax website with comprehensive inventory details, alongside powerful sales tools for accurate vehicle comparisons, model year feature summaries, and genuine customer reviews.
To efficiently manage, publish, and update this massive volume of data, CarMax adopted an AI-driven solution to enhance its car research tools and overall customer experience.
AI Platform Enhancing Car Buying Research
CarMax partnered with the cloud-based OpenAI API, gaining access to advanced large-scale models including GPT-3, Codex, and embeddings. These models, trained on trillions of words, enable the development of versatile solutions for various applications, from writing assistance to code generation and data analysis.
To ensure scalable deployment across its extensive inventory, CarMax transitioned its OpenAI operations to Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service. Azure OpenAI Service provides CarMax with access to built-in Responsible AI principles and enterprise-grade capabilities inherent to Microsoft Azure, including robust security, compliance, and broad regional availability.
“Security is our top priority as we deeply value our customers and are committed to protecting their information,” Mohammad emphasizes. “Having been Azure users for some time, we are confident in the robust security it offers and the support we receive. It was also crucial for us to choose a service with Responsible AI features, ensuring alignment with our core company values.”
The migration from OpenAI to Azure OpenAI Service proved remarkably smooth for CarMax. “It was surprisingly easy,” remarks Kevin Hopwood, Cloud Solutions Architect at CarMax. “Simply changing an endpoint was all it took, and everything continued to function seamlessly. There was no learning curve, and we maintained our momentum without interruption.”
Creating Customer-Centric Content with AI-Powered Tools
Azure OpenAI Service plays a crucial role in CarMax’s content creation for its car research webpages. For instance, the 2018 Kia Sorento page features AI-generated content in sections like “New this year” and “2018 Kia Sorento trims,” along with related article summaries and concise two-sentence customer review summaries.
The customer review summary was the first type of content CarMax chose to generate using Azure OpenAI Service as part of their car research tools. “Today’s customers increasingly value peer opinions, making reviews essential. However, a single car model can have thousands of reviews,” explains Sean Goetz, Director, Application Systems at CarMax. “With Azure OpenAI Service, we can efficiently condense numerous reviews into easily digestible summaries across our entire inventory.”
After AI generates content, CarMax editors review the text to ensure contextual relevance and brand voice consistency. The outcomes have been exceptional. “Our initial goal was to create customer review summaries for 5,000 vehicle pages. Using our previous manual process, we estimated this would take around 11 years,” Goetz states. “With Azure OpenAI Service, we achieved this in just a few months, and the quality, after some fine-tuning, surpassed our expectations, with an 80 percent editorial approval rate.” This highlights the efficiency and effectiveness of AI as a car research tool enhancement.
CarMax has identified significant advantages in using Azure OpenAI Service compared to the basic OpenAI API. “The primary benefit is deployment management,” Hopwood points out. “It allows us to easily scale custom models, deploy them, run language tasks, and then decommission them. This scalability is incredibly valuable. Azure OpenAI Service offers substantial cost and time savings for our car research tools development.”
Reinventing the Used Car Industry Through Innovative Car Research
Ultimately, CarMax’s focus remains on the customer and the associates who support them. “We are providing both our customers and employees with all necessary information, empowering customers to feel confident and make well-informed decisions at every stage of their purchase journey,” Mohammad says. “With Azure OpenAI Service, we are again disrupting the industry by delivering cutting-edge digital tools and capabilities, establishing ourselves as a true omnichannel retailer with superior car research tools.”
By leveraging Azure OpenAI Service, CarMax produces website content much more efficiently, freeing up editorial staff for strategic, in-depth content creation. “Our content creators excel in their roles, and we want them to feel valued,” Mohammad adds. “By entrusting data-intensive summarization tasks to Azure OpenAI Service, we enable them to focus on more creative and fulfilling work.”
Generating valuable content with relevant keywords through AI-powered car research tools also boosts CarMax’s search engine rankings, driving increased website traffic. “Our search engine metrics are consistently improving,” Goetz notes. “Azure OpenAI Service is significantly contributing to our SEO performance.”
Building on its success, CarMax is exploring new applications for Azure OpenAI Service, such as generating text for car comparisons, further enhancing their suite of car research tools. “We know that certain cars are comparable to a Ford Mustang, but what if we could provide concise explanations of their similarities and differences?” Hopwood proposes. “That’s one of our upcoming projects.”
Looking beyond current capabilities, CarMax views its collaboration with Microsoft as a natural synergy between innovative organizations. “Innovation is rapidly evolving, so partnering with a company that is constantly innovating and bringing new ideas to the platform was essential,” Mohammad concludes. “We aim to be the most innovative company in our industry, and we trust Microsoft will continue to provide the tools we need to achieve that, especially in the realm of car research tools.”
