Car brands are using AI agents in advertising for four jobs so far: bidding on individual impressions, producing on-brand creative, advising shoppers in conversation, and running the repetitive ad operations work behind campaigns. The clearest public examples come from Hyundai, General Motors, Mazda, BYD, Ford, Renault, Mercedes-Benz USA, Toyota dealers, Volkswagen and Cox Automotive, each documented by the company itself, its technology partner or trade press.

TL;DR: Ten named, dated examples follow, grouped by the job the agent does. In almost every case a person still signs off the consequential step, whether that is approving a film, reviewing exceptions or supervising an orchestrator. For automotive marketers, the useful question is less whether agents work and more which decisions they are allowed to take alone.

How are car brands using AI agents in advertising?

Car brands are using AI agents to buy media more precisely, produce creative faster, talk to shoppers before they reach a dealer and take routine work off ad operations teams. Each example below gives a date, what the agent does and where the human sits.

Campaign results are left out on purpose, because published figures describe different tests with different baselines.

Which car brands use AI agents to buy media?

1. Hyundai: a bidding agent that runs inside the SSP (June 2026)

Hyundai was the pilot advertiser for OpenXBuild, the container product from the SSP OpenX, working with the custom bidding company Chalice AI, AdExchanger reported on 16 June 2026. The model sits inside OpenX's platform and values impressions against Hyundai's own "high-value actions", such as a dealership visit. Digiday reported that Hyundai's in-house media agency, Canvas, worked on the custom models and bidding agents.

Hyundai CMO Sean Gilpin told AdExchanger the test covered three models, the Tucson, Santa Fe and Palisade, and would expand to the whole fleet. He said Hyundai owns the IP of the targeting model the vendor built: "we want to own that." Chalice AI's chief executive Adam Heimlich told MediaPost that the setup uses an IAB standard, the Agentic Real Time Framework (ARTF), which lets a partner's agent run as a container inside a host platform.

A worked example shows the step before a test like this goes live. On Alkimi, a car brand's media team could build its own buying agent in the Gym, write the rules it works to (which models, which markets, the most it may commit without sign-off) and spar it against seller agents before any real money moves.

Which car brands use AI agents to make advertising creative?

2. General Motors: Metropolis moves towards an agentic workflow (October 2025)

At the ANA Masters of Marketing conference, GM's Norm de Greve showed an unaired Chevy Silverado ad made by GM's proprietary AI engine, Metropolis, MediaPost reported on 23 October 2025. Metropolis is trained on GM's brand and product DNA, and de Greve said it is evolving into a fully agentic workflow that can generate commercials from insight to finished film. He was clear about the limit: "It doesn't have breakthrough creativity. Our agencies still do that."

The tool sits inside a wider restructure. Adweek reported that GM's 2024 model brought strategy, insights and data in house while continuing to use creative agencies for brand ideas.

3. Mazda: a commercial produced with Luma Agents (April 2026)

Luma announced on 15 April 2026 that Boundless, an independent agency in Johannesburg, produced Mazda's first AI-produced commercial using Luma Agents, a creative workflow system. The film supports the return of the MX-5 to the South African market and follows driver after driver through the same moment across decades. Deolinda Da Costa, Head of Marketing and Communications at Mazda Southern Africa, said "technology must always emphasize the essential emotion behind any experience of the vehicle."

4. BYD: agents for local content in minutes (June 2026)

At Cannes Lions 2026, BYD executive vice-president Stella Li told Martin Sorrell that the company plans to bring AI agents into its sales and marketing, ETBrandEquity reported on 24 June 2026. "With today's AI technology, we can produce very high-quality content in ten minutes," she said. Regional teams would turn technical features, such as battery efficiency, into local everyday terms.

5. Ford: AI across planning, assets and targeting (September 2025)

Ford CMO Lisa Materazzo told MediaPost in September 2025 that AI is affecting everything from "how we plan and how we execute internally to even the creation of assets and the targeting of assets." She described building a digital twin of a vehicle for markets where only a detail such as the grille changes, adding: "We would always anchor it in something that's real."

Ford's comments describe generative AI more than agents, and the difference matters. A generative tool makes an asset when asked, while an agent pursues a goal across several steps, as explained in generative AI vs agentic AI in advertising.

Which car brands put AI agents in front of shoppers?

6. Renault: askrnlt, a multi-agent adviser (since November 2025)

Renault Group describes askrnlt as its first customer-facing application of agentic AI, live on renault.fr since November 2025 and renault.es since April 2026. An orchestrator agent, powered by Gemini 2.5 Flash, sends each request to specialised agents such as the configurator, and human oversight remains in place. It was developed in house by Renault Group's AI, IS/IT and Renault brand marketing teams.

"With askrnlt, our Group is making 2026 the year of AI agent orchestration," said Anthony Vouillon, Director of the Augmented Renault AI Centre of Excellence.

7. Mercedes-Benz USA: a Showroom ad inside Copilot (June 2025)

Microsoft Advertising said on 12 June 2025 that Mercedes-Benz USA was a pilot partner developing a Showroom ad for the Mercedes-Maybach, a conversational ad format inside Copilot. The same post said brand agents "today reside on a website, but in the future, they will be able to be invoked by other agents."

8. Toyota dealers: a voice agent hosted by an AI Brock Purdy (December 2025)

ElevenLabs reported on 4 December 2025 that Toyota's Northern California Dealers Association and agency H/L launched a voice-driven trivia game hosted by an AI version of 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy, built on the ElevenLabs Agents platform. A custom knowledge base kept the agent within Toyota and NFL brand guidelines, and a completed game led to a contest entry.

9. Volkswagen, Ford and Mazda: ads inside AI assistants (2026)

This is the reverse case, where brands place ads in the AI assistants shoppers ask for advice. MediaPost reported in February 2026 that Ford and Mazda were among the brands in the ChatGPT ads pilot. When ChatGPT Ads launched in Europe through Adform in September 2026, Volkswagen's Petter Mååg said testing them "allows us to explore how our brand can engage meaningfully in this emerging environment", Advanced Television reported.

Which automotive businesses use AI agents for ad operations?

10. Cox Automotive: five ad operations agents in production (from December 2025)

MediaMint says it began deploying Mia, its agentic AI platform built on Claude, inside Cox Automotive's advertising operations in December 2025. Five agents are live, covering trafficking, audience segment monitoring, reporting, owned and operated campaigns, and avails checks, with a roadmap towards 50. Cox's team reviews what the agents surface and handles exceptions, and the more variable workflows are being added later for that reason.

What do the car brand examples have in common?

Every agent in these examples is scoped to one job. None is a general marketing brain: Hyundai's values impressions, Renault's routes questions, Cox's run named workflows.

The human sits at a different rung in each case, and a five-step ladder makes the differences visible: Observe, Recommend, Draft, Human-approved action, Bounded automatic action. GM's and Mazda's agents work at Draft, with people approving the film. Hyundai's bidding agent sits closest to Bounded automatic action, acting on each impression inside a campaign that people set.

Ownership keeps coming up. Hyundai wants to own its targeting model, GM built Metropolis itself and Renault built askrnlt in house, which suggests car brands treat the agent's learning as an asset worth keeping.

What should a car brand check before an agent spends its budget?

A short checklist covers most of the risk:

Write down which rung of the autonomy ladder the agent works at, and what would move it up or down.
Set the limits in the agent's rules: which models, which markets and the largest commitment it can make without sign-off.
Agree who owns the model and the data it learns from before the test starts.
Ask which standard it runs under. Lead with IAB Tech Lab's AAMP, which covers in-platform agents through ARTF, and check AdCP support where a counterparty uses it.
Make sure both sides hold the same record of what was agreed. In the Agree. Transact. Verify. simulation, 95.3% of deals had mismatched records when each side kept its own, against 0.19% with a shared record.

Where do agent testing and trading platforms fit?

Alkimi is an enterprise platform for agentic advertising, built for the step after the creative and conversational agents described above, when agents start to agree media deals. Concourse benchmarks AI media-buying agents, the Gym lets buyers and sellers build their own agents and spar before real money moves, and the Marketplace works within IAB Tech Lab's AAMP framework today and is being built to be AdCP compatible. People keep approval rights at the deal level, and each agreed deal is written to a DealSheet that is timestamped, held by both parties and retrievable by either side.

Frequently asked questions

Are car brands using AI agents to buy media?

Yes, in tests. Hyundai was the pilot advertiser for a bidding agent inside OpenX's SSP in 2026 and planned to expand it from three models to its full range.

What is the difference between generative AI and an AI agent in car advertising?

Generative AI makes an asset when asked, such as a vehicle image for a new market. An AI agent pursues a goal in steps, such as answering a shopper's question or bidding on an impression.

Do AI agents replace a car brand's agencies?

Not in the public examples. GM's Norm de Greve said breakthrough creativity still comes from agencies, and Mazda and the Toyota dealers both worked through agencies.

Which standards apply to AI agents buying automotive media?

IAB Tech Lab's AAMP is the main reference, including ARTF for agents that run inside a host platform. AdCP, the Ad Context Protocol from AgenticAdvertising.org, is a second protocol some counterparties use.

AI Agents in Automotive Advertising: What Car Brands Are Doing