For an automotive company like Ford Motor Company, entering into e-commerce isn’t as linear. There’s no playbook for retailing high-value assets like cars.
“For a company like Ford, e-commerce means very different from buying something on Amazon,” Suresh Kandula, CTO, Integrated Services & Director, Marketing and Sales Technology for Ford Motor Company, tells AIM.
The Ford.com workflow is largely designed for exploring vehicles. Customers browse SUVs, trucks, vans and cars. They customise features, colours, and packages. Then, they locate matching configurations at nearby dealerships, and finally, transactions, financing and delivery are done through independent dealers.
This model reflects Ford’s B2B2C structure, where digital engagement is integrated with dealership partners.
Ford is now developing a cloud-native, microservices architecture-based e-commerce platform designed for agility, scalability and resilience. It has rolled out customer-facing “agentic” AI capabilities across its retail platforms in North America.
“This platform of capabilities enables built-to-order experiences, allowing customers to personalise products,” the CTO says.
Its India technology global capabilities centres (GCCs) in Chennai and Bengaluru are supporting the development of its e-commerce and dealer technology platforms.
“Technology teams operating in Chennai and Bengaluru are critical to Ford's strategic technology capability delivery,” Kandula notes. He leads a global team of around 2,000 people responsible for digital product development and retail e-commerce technologies.
The India team focuses on building e-commerce solutions, dealer technology, including dealership operations management, and customer marketing and sales technology across global markets.
Layering Agentic AI
While the e-commerce platform itself began about two-and-a-half years ago, AI agents were introduced more recently.
“Ten months ago, we probably had our first agent, which is our contact centre. And five months ago is when we had our first e-commerce agent,” Kandula notes.
According to Kandula, these external-facing AI capabilities currently live in North America.
The contact centre AI supports existing vehicle owners with queries around subscriptions, billing, loyalty points, mobile app usage, and vehicle-related support.
The e-commerce agent assists prospective buyers with model comparisons, specifications, trims, towing capacity, and accessories.
One AI-enabled feature acts as a unified entry point for website queries.
“We’ve launched an AI agent that acts as a single front door for customer questions,” Kandula explains. “It can query multiple knowledge bases, access tools like a towing calculator, and synthesise the information into one clear, referenced answer.”
He distinguishes between generative AI responses and what he described as the agent layer. “The agent layer is actually reasoning the types of questions the customer is asking for and what's the best way to represent that answer,” he adds.
In certain cases, the agent invokes backend tools. For example, if a customer asks about a recall, “that agent doesn't know immediately. So it needs to call a tool to find whether there is any recall or not.”
Ford uses open integration standards for orchestration.
“We use open protocols that agents use, whether it's ADK, A2A, ACP, MCP,” Kandula mentions, adding that the company uses a mix of commercial and open-source tools. He confirms using Google ADK, but did not name other vendors.
Marketing, Sales Technology Focus
Ford’s marketing and sales technology team leverages advanced data and analytics to enhance customer experience and dealer experience. The objective is to create more personalised engagement across the customer lifecycle while operating within the complexity of a franchise-based dealership network.
To support integration with thousands of dealerships, Ford works with industry consortia such as STAR to standardise interoperability approaches rather than mandate specific dealer systems.
Adoption Before Efficiency
Kandula says the current focus of AI deployment is adoption and customer experience rather than cost reduction.
“It’s not so much about savings,” he notes. “It’s about multi-channel or omni-channel.”
On the workforce impact, he adds, “There is no reduction in people requirement in my team… because of these tools right now.” Measurement currently centres on usage.
“Right now, it is a citizen tool at this point. Everybody wants to use the tools. So our focus on measurements is adoption… Is it being used every sprint? Is it being used for every check-in?”
Industry Recognition
The work supported by the Chennai and Bengaluru teams has helped Ford receive among the highest rankings for mass-market automaker websites in recent years.
According to the JD Power 2025 US Manufacturer Website Evaluation Study (Winter), Ford ranks highest among mass-market manufacturer websites with a score of 719.
As Ford continues modernising its retail stack and dealer technology platforms, AI is being positioned as an enabler of customer engagement within its franchise-based model, with India’s GCC teams supporting key elements of that digital buildout.
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