Rivian is building its own AI assistant | TechCrunch

"Rivian has spent nearly two years building its own AI assistant, an effort that remains separate from its multi-billion dollar technology joint venture with Volkswagen, TechCrunch has learned. Rivian hasn't revealed when it will put the AI assistant in consumers hands. However, in an interview earlier this year, Rivian's software chief Wassym Bensaid told TechCrunch it was targeting the end of the year. The company will likely share more during its upcoming AI and Autonomy day."

"The Rivian AI assistant team, which is based out the company's Palo Alto office, soon realized effort and attention should also be directed towards developing the software layers that help coordinate various workflows as well as the control logic that resolves conflicts. "And that's the in-vehicle platform we have built," Bensaid said. "We use what the industry loves to now call an agentic framework; but we thought about that architecture since very early so that we can interface with different models.""

Rivian spent nearly two years developing an in-house AI assistant that remains separate from its multibillion-dollar technology joint venture with Volkswagen. The company has not publicly deployed the assistant and was targeting the end of the year for consumer availability. Development focused on tight integration with vehicle controls rather than a simple infotainment chatbot. The engineering team in Palo Alto designed a model- and platform-agnostic architecture and built software layers to coordinate workflows and control logic to resolve conflicts. The platform uses an agentic framework to interface with different AI models. The effort aligns with Rivian’s broader push toward vertical integration.

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