GM Rebuilds OnStar Around an In-House AI Assistant, Starting With the 2027 Cadillac Lyriq

General Motors is turning OnStar into something bigger than a button on the rearview mirror. The 30-year-old connected-car service is getting a personal AI assistant, built in-house, that will first appear in the 2027 Cadillac Lyriq EV within the coming months before spreading across the lineup.

The reveal came Wednesday at GM’s Forward event in New York, where the automaker rolled out a batch of technology announcements. Alongside the assistant, GM confirmed a fresh OnStar mobile app landing in 2027 that will sync with the vehicle’s in-car software.

That app will absorb a fair amount of existing software. It replaces the OnStar Guardian app introduced in 2020, and it also takes over the separate brand apps for Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet and GMC.

From Call Center to ‘Connected Intelligence’

The strategic shift matters more than the feature list. Sterling Anderson, GM’s chief product officer, framed OnStar as something that now interprets and anticipates rather than simply responds.

“OnStar is now transitioning to be a connected intelligence platform, not just the call center that it’s historically been known as, but a mechanism for interpreting, understanding, and providing predictive, proactive support to its owners.”

Connected cameras are a big part of that pitch. Owners will be able to pull live views, and the system can wake the cameras automatically when it detects an impending event — a sharp horn blast, for instance — then capture footage and push it to the OnStar app. Voice controls will handle climate settings and answer questions about vehicle functions.

GM says privacy guardrails are in place: customers choose what gets shared, recordings are encrypted and time-limited, and neither GM nor OnStar can access Connected Camera footage.

The privacy emphasis is not incidental. GM has taken heat — and been fined — over how it handled data sharing with outside parties.

Why GM Is Building This Itself

OnStar has been refreshed plenty of times before. Guardian expanded in 2021 to anyone with a compatible phone, whether or not they owned a GM vehicle. Google Cloud’s Dialogflow came aboard in 2022 to parse spoken requests, and 2023 brought answers to routine queries like routing and navigation.

Those earlier efforts leaned on Google. GM even said last year that Gemini would reach its vehicles in 2026. The new assistant is different — it is GM’s own work, aimed at a more tailored, interactive experience for drivers and passengers.

There’s a financial motive underneath. GM has been chasing a $25 billion subscription business by 2030, and a stickier OnStar helps that math.

• First vehicle: 2027 Cadillac Lyriq EV
• New mobile app: Arrives 2027, replaces Guardian plus Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet and GMC apps
• Camera features: Live view, automatic event capture, encrypted and time-limited storage
• Voice control: Climate functions and vehicle feature questions

The broader context is the industry-wide scramble to match Chinese automakers on software. Tech that used to be bolted on as a gimmick now sits at the center of the vehicle — and that has forced GM to rethink how it develops software, adopt AI tooling and design a centralized electrical and compute architecture.

Whether drivers actually want a chatty OnStar is the open question. The hardware and the subscription targets are settled; the habits are not.