Since luxury EV manufacturer Lotus doesn’t have a vast dealer network with showrooms in every city, the only way to reach potential customers for its new Lotus Eletre SUV was the web. But rather than just putting up a site with shiny images, video, and copy, the car company hired the multinational digital brand studio Code d’Azur to create the closest thing to a physical showroom: the Lotus Personal Showroom.
The website—the winner of Fast Company’s 2024 Innovation by Design Awards in the user experience category—lets customers speak to an artificial intelligence salesperson and see the car in detail through videos that are edited on the fly, in real time, to match the answers voiced by the AI.
The Lotus Personal Showroom is minimalist UX experience completely focused on a natural language chat interface. Customers can ask questions via a prompt, and in return they get an AI-generated answer that feels humanistic without the salesmanship of the typical car dealer.
To make this happen, Code d’Azur customized OpenAI’s Chat GPT to speak with the showroom visitors. This was a big challenge for Code d’Azur, as the head of Experience Design David Vogel explained in an email interview: “If you ask the AI to be the perfect salesperson, it will start to make stuff up if it can’t find the right information, but if you steer it towards factual truth only, it might give quite a boring answer instead of trying to find a useful one.”
The result sounds surprisingly human. The answer speed is quick, but not quite ChatGPT-4o level. The videos are crystal clear, though sometimes you will find yourself wanting more opportunity to explore, like you might in a physical car.
Vogel says the current feature set is just the beginning. “The Lotus Showroom is a first step and brings what is possible today to an audience that is not yet used to the advances that we will see in the coming years,” he says. He believes that AI will impact many aspects of UI design too, from a conversational interface like this one all the way to generative UI where the entire application is customized by AI to your profile and needs.
This story is part of Fast Company’s 2024 Innovation by Design Awards. Explore the full list of companies creating products, reimagining spaces, and working to design a better world. Read more about the methodology behind the selection process.