Cox Automotive transforms car sales with Claude in Amazon Bedrock

Cox Automotive, the world's largest automotive services and technology provider, is leveraging Claude in Amazon Bedrock to generate high-quality, tailored content across its portfolio of software solutions, helping dealers and consumers save time on marketing, vehicle merchandising, and routine communications.

With Claude, Cox Automotive is delivering client and consumer benefits, including:

• More than doubling consumer lead responses and test drive appointments through the VinSolutions CRM platform.
• Achieving 80% positive feedback from sellers using AI-generated listings descriptions.
• Reducing dealer website content creation time through managed services platform, achieving same-day deliverables for blog posts and landing pages while also maintaining SEO performance and generating more than 9,000 client deliverables to date.

Meeting modern automotive industry challenges

Fueled by the largest breadth of first-party data and fed by 2.3 billion online interactions a year, Cox Automotive tailors leading solutions for car shoppers, auto manufacturers, dealers, lenders and fleets. The company has a portfolio of industry-leading brands that include Autotrader®, Kelley Blue Book®, Manheim®, vAuto®, Dealertrack®, NextGear Capital™, CentralDispatch® and FleetNet America®.

Over the past decade, their data teams moved from siloed operations focused primarily on vehicle valuations to building a centralized, governed data platform that powers AI applications across all its solutions.

Why Cox Automotive chose Claude

As Cox Automotive started exploring generative AI, they needed a solution that matched their rigorous standards for enterprise deployment. Early on, the team built a sandbox environment to methodically evaluate major large language model providers through direct API testing.

Claude stood out for its strong performance across three critical metrics: latency, cost, and accuracy. Ben Flusberg, Chief Data Officer at Cox Automotive, said, "Claude consistently ranks among the most advanced generative AI models available, and continues to push innovation forward with each update." The team particularly valued Claude's model family approach. "The flexibility of having Sonnet and Haiku models easily available via API in Amazon Bedrock lets us optimize for latency, cost, and accuracy based on each specific use case."

Cox Automotive could select Claude 3.5 Sonnet for complex tasks requiring deeper comprehension, like analyzing its internal data catalog and generating detailed dataset table and column descriptions, while using Claude 3.5 Haiku for high-volume, rapid-response scenarios. This flexibility allowed them to balance performance and cost across their diverse automotive use cases.

As a long-time AWS customer, Cox Automotive also found that accessing Claude models through Amazon Bedrock significantly streamlined their generative AI deployment. "Integrating Claude through our established technology infrastructure made everything easier," said Flusberg.

How Claude powers automotive content creation and personalized communications

Cox Automotive is currently leveraging Claude to enhance three key products:

• VinSolutions CRM transforms dealer-consumer communications by generating personalized emails and texts based on real consumer shopping interests. The system verifies vehicle information against Cox Automotive's proprietary database, ensuring accuracy while driving more engaging dealer-consumer interactions that lead to appointments and sales.
• Autotrader Private Seller Exchange (PSX) powers consumer peer-to-peer vehicle sales by automatically generating compelling used vehicle listing descriptions. The system combines seller input with verified vehicle data, while maintaining human review and editing to ensure quality and accuracy. enabling private parties to market their vehicles more effectively while maintaining marketplace trust.
• Dealer.com managed services creates SEO-optimized blog posts and landing pages for dealer websites that previously took multiple days to produce manually. This content maintains each dealership's unique voice and can be tailored for specific audiences, leveraging Cox Automotive's deep vehicle knowledge for technical accuracy. Through these enhancements, Cox Automotive clients are getting high-quality marketing content online faster than before.

Additionally, Cox Automotive is using Claude to improve its own internal data governance processes. Leveraging sparse metadata as a starting point, the system generates comprehensive descriptions of datasets within their enterprise data platform. This enhanced data foundation enables teams across Cox Automotive to better understand and utilize data assets, reducing friction and creating a flywheel effect for powering further AI applications.

In all these cases, Cox Automotive's systems present the AI-generated content to the user for validation and acceptance, providing an extra layer of oversight to ensure accuracy.

Building an AI-powered future for the automotive industry

Cox Automotive sees AI as key to transforming the automotive industry through differentiated customer experiences and more streamlined operations. They invest heavily in maintaining a high-quality data foundation, generating actionable intelligence across automotive domains, and fostering a data-driven culture of testing and learning. Their methodical approach to AI innovation guides their strategy. Flusberg said, "Driving value for our customers and for consumers is our North Star. We seek ways to improve processes using data and AI, and then we prove it out through rapid prototyping." This focused experimentation allows Cox Automotive to move from successful pilots to broader implementations that benefit their entire ecosystem. By combining their automotive expertise, vast connected data resources, and Claude's cutting-edge capabilities deployed in Amazon Bedrock, Cox Automotive is well positioned to continue leading an AI-driven transformation across the automotive industry.