Transforming the Automotive Aftermarket Customer Journey with Generative AI: Tech Mahindra’s AftEAZE on AWS

By Nisha Taneja, Product Architect – Tech Mahindra
By Ravi Kiran Kalabarigi, Product Manager – Tech Mahindra
By Karthik Parthasarathy Hosadurgam, Chief Technology Officer – Tech Mahindra
By Sathish Arumugam, Senior Partner Solutions Architect – AWS
By Shonil Kulkarni, Senior Manager – Partner Solution Architect, Global Lead – AWS

Tech Mahindra

Imagine driving off the lot in your new car, excited about the future. But what happens when you need your first oil change, or encounter an unexpected issue? This is where the automotive aftermarket journey begins and it’s often a maze of disconnected processes and missed opportunities.

For consumers, navigating post-purchase services can be frustrating and confusing. For businesses, this represents a critical post-sale touchpoint for continued engagement, seamless product experience, brand loyalty, and additional aftermarket opportunities. Currently, most aftermarket processes operate in silos, with little integration or automation.

This blog explores how Generative AI (GenAI) is revolutionizing the aftermarket landscape, creating a seamless, personalized experience for consumers while unlocking new value for businesses. We’ll dive into how this technology is transforming every aspect of the automotive aftermarket, from predictive maintenance to personalized services, and how it’s creating win-win scenarios for both consumers and businesses in this multi-billion dollar industry.

Benefits of Integrating GenAI in Automotive Aftermarket Operations

GenAI can be integrated across aftermarket functions to deliver an efficient, personalized, and sustainable platform that benefits the automotive aftermarket stakeholders and the end customer.

Responsive customer support can enhance the personalized customer experience and open new revenue streams through tailored products and services. Additionally, it can enable the development of specialized solutions to improve vehicle performance, safety, and efficiency. This can be achieved by leveraging predictive maintenance, identifying recurring issues, diagnosing potential malfunctions, and providing actionable insights. This can prevent future failures, reduce breakdowns, optimize costs, and minimize service turnaround time.

Personalized experiences and proactive engagement can captivate customers throughout their journey, fostering stronger connections and loyalty. By streamlining aftermarket delivery processes and reducing lead times, businesses can swiftly resolve customer needs, significantly enhance the overall aftermarket experience, and improve customer retention rates. This can increase sales, achieve targeted revenue growth, and build long-term customer relationships.

A forward-thinking aftermarket strategy empowers stakeholders to maintain a competitive edge in a dynamic market, offering unique value propositions and sustainable business models. By embracing innovation, businesses can streamline operations, boost revenue, enhance productivity, and effectively mitigate risks, positioning themselves as industry leaders in the evolving aftermarket landscape.

AftEAZE’s GenAI: Driving Next-Generation Innovation in the Automotive Aftermarket

Tech Mahindra’s AftEAZE is a cloud-native solution built on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and powered by Pega Platform™. It is a highly customizable and modular platform augmented by GenAI and AI-ML to kick-start and accelerate your journey toward a state-of-the-art, future-ready aftersales support system.

It focuses on aftermarket transformation to sustain customer retention. This involves introducing new product channels or marketplaces, providing proactive servicing, resolving customer requests at the first point of contact, and improving overall warranty spending.

AftEAZE manages connected assets, service management, and claims transformation. It covers a vehicle or asset’s entire post-sale/aftermarket journey, from sales to alerts and monitoring, service visits, diagnostics, repair and handover, warranty claims, supplier recovery, and repurchase.

As envisioned by Tech Mahindra, the AftEAZE aftermarket solution is classified under four categories:

• Connected Vehicle Management – Optimizing customer uptime with live vehicle monitoring and predictive services for connected drivers, fleet managers, command center agents, etc.
• Service Lifecycle Management – Enabling a connected, integrated, and collaborative service experience for service advisors, service managers, service technicians, etc.
• Parts and Inventory Management – Demand forecasting for assured service parts availability for parts purchase manager, parts analyst, etc., enabling remanufacturing of core value parts for logistics management teams at dealers and factory/assembly at OEMs.
• Warranty Management – End-to-end warranty management across OEMs, dealers, and suppliers.

GenAI Aftermarket Integration with AftEAZE

Here is a brief overview of how GenAI integration with AftEAZE can benefit aftermarket stakeholders and customers:

• Sale – Virtual and voice assistants can be provided during the sale to provide query assistance for documentation like policy wording and service manuals or technical support, troubleshoot common issues, and understand vehicle diagnostics.
• Alerts and Monitoring – Alerts and monitoring configured with connected vehicle data can predict maintenance needs, pass real-time feedback to the driver, provide personalized coaching, and improve driving habits and road safety.
• Service Visit – Predict service and maintenance needs, invoke service schedules via easy-to-chat with technicians with the right skills and parts available for repairs, and use a chatbot to query documents.
• Diagnostics – Diagnostics powered by previously performed repairs, customer descriptions of the issue, known product issues, available technical bulletins, and connected vehicle data correlated with other related parameters can provide accurate diagnostic and actionable insights.
• Repair & Handover – Offer tailored recommendations for repairs and upgrade personalized contracts to customers that cater to their specific preferences based on past claim and repair data.
• Warranty Claim – Streamlined warranty and claims administration by evaluating and correlating the claim data with the attached invoices and images. This can reduce the manual review efforts by flagging incorrect, fraudulent, or duplicate claims.
• Supplier Recovery – Efficient supplier recovery by processing the claim data ensuring supplier accountability, reducing financial losses, and promoting better collaboration.

GenAI can be leveraged across all automotive aftermarket functions, from sale to repurchase and surface cross-sell or upsell opportunities.

AftEAZE Solution Overview

AftEAZE is an AWS cloud-native solution integrated with GenAI that simplifies business processes and addresses End-to-End digital transformation to accelerate and modernize aftermarket product development and innovation.

* The architecture diagram depicts the main GenAI components and their integration, a subset of the overall AftEAZE architecture.

Below are the high-level components of the AftEAZE solution and their details:

1. AftEAZE UI: Built on Pega Platform™ User Interface (UI) and Angular UI. The chatbot is integrated using Streamlit for querying structured & unstructured data, including the querying of any documents uploaded through the AftEAZE web client.
2. Pega UI: The front-end for users to enter/upload data and display data received through the Pega integration. Pega UI is part of the application and is hosted on a Pega Server built on Pega Warranty™ for Manufacturing™, which works on the different warranty case types.
3. Pega Connect REST: Support interactions between the Pega Platform and connect to the Python components via REST endpoints.
4. Business components: The Python component handles the business logic and interfaces with Amazon Bedrock. It can be deployed on Amazon Elastic Container Service or as part of an AWS Lambda function, which ensures the application can scale up or down based on demand while maintaining performance and cost efficiency.
5. Amazon S3 stores static content, files, and other unstructured data.
6. Data Stores: Postgres SQL and Amazon OpenSearch are the main data stores the for the application. Amazon OpenSearch is used to store chunks and embeddings. Postgres database is used to store and query structured data. Amazon Bedrock Agents connect with OpenSearch and Postgres to fetch to the respective data.
7. GenAI Amazon Bedrock: Managed service offering from AWS provides access to Large Language Model (LLM). Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases is used as the centralized repository for the application’s unstructured data and to implement the Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) workflow without having to build custom components to achieve the same. Amazon Bedrock Agents facilitates seamless integration and communication between the Python components, LLM, and the action group, ensuring efficient data flow and task orchestration.
8. Amazon API Gateway: Entry point for client requests, routing them to the appropriate backend services.
9. Security Services: AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), Amazon GuardDuty, and AWS Secrets Manager monitor threats, enforce security policies, and detect anomalies, providing proactive threat detection and mitigation to safeguard critical assets and data.
10. Metrics and Monitoring: Amazon CloudWatch, and AWS CloudTrail provide application-level management and governance. They monitor and log the application’s performance in real time to identify and resolve issues quickly.

AftEAZE Solution Benefits

• Enterprise-grade scalability and security powered by AWS’s cloud infrastructure.
• Comprehensive digital transformation through Pega’s unified architecture, enabling end-to-end aftermarket process automation.
• Seamless integration capabilities with existing systems and business processes, offering complete operational ownership and extensibility.
• Demonstrated successes with leading Automotive OEMs. For instance, one OEM automated over 50% of warranty claims to save $30 to $50 million per year, and another leading OEM used AftEAZE’s AI-driven warranty claims pre-validation engine to save $40 million per year.
• Advanced GenAI integration driving:
  • Optimized warranty management and cost reduction,
  • Elevated customer satisfaction through personalized experiences,
  • Sustainable business growth through data-driven insights,
  • Improved operational efficiency across the aftermarket value chain, etc.

Conclusion

The automotive aftermarket industry is experiencing rapid transformation through GenAI integration. Tech Mahindra’s AftEAZE solution, built on AWS, represents a comprehensive approach to modernizing aftermarket operations. Combining advanced GenAI capabilities with robust cloud infrastructure, AftEAZE enables automotive businesses to deliver enhanced customer experiences, optimize operations, and drive sustainable growth in an increasingly competitive market.

To learn more or schedule a demo, contact Tech Mahindra.

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Tech Mahindra is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner and MSP that specializes in digital transformation, consulting, and business re-engineering solutions.

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