CarMax drives business value with GPT-3.5

First-mover AI benefits

CarMax’s IT leaders and IT staff were experimenting with OpenAI’s GPT-3.x natural language model on pilots before Microsoft’s well publicized $10 billion investment in the nonprofit at the outset of 2023.  

In this early use case, the CarMax team employed GPT 3.5’s enhanced “iteration on prompts” to feed scrubbed and formatted data for thousands of used cars into a DaVinci model. Following that, a small dataset was sent for editing and fine-tuning and the content was pumped into the DaVinci model for mass publishing and consumer consumption.

Because use of the DaVinci natural language model itself requires fewer data scientists , which are scarce and super expensive, CarMax was also able to realize IT cost benefits, in addition to content creation savings.  

“The model’s ability to learn with just a few examples of intended outputs, a process called few-shot learning, helps CarMax’s 60-plus product teams use the models without requiring additional teams of data scientists,” according to a CarMax representative.

Creating car research content using AI eases the car purchasing process for consumers and the content creation process for editors. But perhaps most important, it drives an order of magnitude more inventory, eyeballs, reviews, and sales for CarMax.com. This is due to CarMax’s use of the cloud-based OpenAI API natural language model, which enables the extraction of millions — not thousands — of keywords.

As a pioneer, CarMax is reaping the early benefits of what will likely be a major business driver across the globe, one analyst says.