CarMax aims to advance AI and bridge digital and store experiences

CarMax CEO Keith Barr is focused on simplifying its customer experience and seamlessly handing off from the company's app and AI touch points to the in-store experience. Barr's bet: Improving digital sales will drive growth.

Speaking on CarMax's September second quarter earnings call, Barr said:

“We will make it easy to do business with us, both online and in our stores. This quarter, we enhanced the customer experience to better support the purchase journey from digital to in-person. We scaled AI voice technology to 100% of both inbound store and customer experience center calls, which enables customers to quickly resolve their inquiries through our agentic AI tools or directly connect to the right associate for help.”

The digital experience is just one silo Barr is trying to collapse. He outlined the following pillars for CarMax going forward under a strategy called Shift into Gear:

• A great offering that includes pricing remains competitive with a good selection of inventory. CarMax is incorporating competitive market insights into its pricing algorithms.
• An easy experience for consumers. “We improved our digital experience by redesigning our car detail page to make it easier for customers to find and buy the right car for them,” said Barr. “Recent updates include providing greater visibility into our inventory selection, incorporating personalized monthly payments and communicating next steps in the purchase process more clearly. The enhancements we made this quarter supported sales conversion, and we anticipate further gains over time.”
• Digital capabilities will be better integrated with stores to improve conversion.
• Add growth opportunities to each transaction. The company is looking to grow profitability with extended protection plans.
• The company will run lean and self-fund competitive vehicle prices via more efficient operations. Logistics will focus on unproductive transfers and optimizing fleets.

CarMax said it will outline a comprehensive strategy for investors in November. In the meantime, CarMax moved to unify management of its end-to-end customer experience from customer acquisition to vehicle transaction. The company named Elizabeth Dirgins, a former Volkswagen executive, chief digital and customer officer. Jeff Campbell, a CarMax veteran, was promoted to senior vice president of strategy. Campbell will oversee a centralized unit focused on strategy, data science, AI and pricing for decision velocity.

What'll be interesting to watch is how CarMax's efforts with Auros evolves. Auros, the company formerly known as UserTesting, outlined a strategy where it will combine UserTesting, User Interviews and its network of 7.6 million verified people to train AI models and applications.

"We spent twenty years building the infrastructure to find real people, verify who they are, and connect companies with their perspectives and expertise,” said Eric Johnson, CEO of Auros. “As AI becomes more capable, access to real people and verified human expertise becomes more valuable, not less."

Auros is looking to leverage its verifiable human network to understand the disconnect in AI-driven digital experiences. "There's human intelligence in our network that can be put to work helping train models, helping to really ensure that agents do what they're meant to do and also leave you feeling great about it," said Auros Chief Marketing Officer Johann Wrede in an interview with Constellation Research analyst Liz Miller. "There are many dimensions of human intelligence such as taste, discernment and things that are really hard to quantify."

Should Auros quantify that human element in customer journeys that are increasingly driven by AI agents, customers like CarMax could benefit. The effort to create the connective tissue between AI and human experiences is going to be worth watching.

CarMax's track record with Auros

CarMax was the first auto retailer to be included in OpenAI's ChatGPT App Store and has used its app to close used car deals. Prior to launch, CarMax used Auros to test the ChatGPT CarMax app with real car shoppers. Insights from that effort led to CarMax to focus on a "smart friend" feel over a search tool vibe. CarMax then created a 12-domain evaluation framework to govern every AI conversation across the company. Indeed, Auros named CarMax an Illumi award winner in 2026, recognizing leadership in leveraging human insights to transform customer experiences.

Other notable efforts between Auros and CarMax include:

• CarMax has used UserTesting, Auros’ customer experience and human insight platform, to develop its online and digital presence. Customer research moved from web-only analysis to panels using products directly. In-person usability testing led to UX improvements and Auros moved to real-time insights to understand customer experience gaps that prevented conversions. The used auto dealer now tests for human reaction on everything including the website, prototypes, landing pages and apps. CarMax also uses Auros to create empathy maps and iterate on product ideas. The companies also brought real customer feedback into Figma designs for customer surfaces.
• CarMax and Auros worked together on the Skye 24/7 virtual assistant that's built on OpenAI technology and layered into ChatGPT. A customer can search for vehicle details and features, get financing options including pre-qualification details and payment options, ask about live inventory and schedule in-store visits. The ChatGPT CarMax app can even give preliminary estimates for trade-ins. In an interview with auto industry outlet, Auto Remarketing, CarMax chief innovation and people officer Diane Cafritz said, “We’ve applied AI thoughtfully to help customers get support earlier in the journey, while keeping associates focused on the moments where human interaction adds the most value.”

• Bringing the conversation to ChatGPT interface marked another opportunity for CarMax to bring simplified conversations to the customer. With Auros, the app could be developed with the customer holding a seat at the development table. “All of our AI use cases are guided by our foundational values of honesty, integrity and transparency,” Cafritz said. “As conversational AI becomes a more common way for people to research complex purchases, access to accurate, trusted information matters more than ever. We are building our tools carefully with responsible practices and human oversight so customers benefit from guidance grounded in verified information.”

What's next?

Barr noted on recent CarMax earnings and investor calls that the goal of the company is to improve processes across the board and reduce the friction that curb growth. Barr said by becoming more efficient on the back end and driving growth on the front end, CarMax can thrive.

"We have a significant number of initiatives, leveraging technology and processes to make sure our costs stay in control and pricing is competitive," said Barr. "And we're also continuing to reduce friction in the digital experience to have it better connected to our stores where the magic really happens."

Barr outlined a few examples of reducing friction in the digital journey that ranged from improving the entry point for customers arriving from online ads, navigating the website to get prequalification to reserving a car and integrating AI assistants. CarMax is also focused on the inbound sales call experience and recently inked a deal with Sierra to deploy AI voice-enabled agents.

"All of the things happening right now are designed to make it easier for our customers to do business with us," said Barr.

In the end, CarMax's transformation is likely to mean a lot more testing and training from Auros. Wrede said Auros is looking to embed human intelligence early in the AI development cycle. That connective tissue could be critical given that it's unlikely an AI agent can walk into a store and sign loan papers and drive off with a vehicle.

Wrede added that CarMax is forward thinking in terms of how "they're employing AI to help consumers shop for vehicles and sell vehicles." He added that CarMax could use Auros to develop specialized models using human intelligence on top of open weight models.

"So helping Skye get smarter, basically by having very purpose built models that get invoked behind the scenes that are really good at helping a customer reach a decision or helping a customer compare and contrast between different makes and models," said Wrede, who added that the Auros human network can be used to train models for multiple internal enterprise use cases.

Barr added that CarMax will be also broadly integrating its data driven marketing team to drive experience.

Barr said:

"One of the things I was really impressed with when I came into CarMax was the caliber of the marketing talent we have from a data analytics perspective and the way that they're focusing on high ROI marketing and being real time, talking week after week, we are sitting down as a team talking about what's happening in terms of sales, what's happening in terms of the broader marketplace, how are we positioned in terms of pricing, what's happening just more broadly across the business, and determining how do we want to invest our marketing dollars to support both sales and also buys, which is an incredibly important part of our business model, too."