How Toyota Turns Complex Repairs into Conversations using NLX

At TechCrunch Sessions: AI, NLX Co-founder and CEO Andrei Papancea joined Kordel France, Principal AI Engineer at Toyota North America, to share how real-world AI is transforming one of the most operationally intense areas of the automotive industry: vehicle servicing.

The partnership with NLX has led to the development of a solution that helps Toyota technicians access critical information faster, reduce repair times, improve productivity, and ultimately enhance the customer experience. 

France shared that as vehicles become more complex, technicians are still expected to work just as quickly. For dealerships, this directly impacts fixed operations efficiency, which refers to the number of repairs completed per hour and is a key driver of service revenue. The problem? Finding the right repair information takes time. 

“You have to get out from under the vehicle, walk over to a computer that everyone shares, log in, wash your hands, take the gloves off,” he explained. “Then you have to do a very elaborate keyword search through manuals that are literally tens of thousands of pages.”

Working closely with NLX, Toyota built a conversational application that lets technicians speak or type naturally to retrieve structured answers complete with cited references from repair manuals and document highlights. 

“One thing that really drove home with me,” France said, “is that NLX had a very mature platform that had a lot of human-style conversation ability built into it.”

“The first iteration took about a week,” Papancea said. “We focused on the real needs of the technicians and worked backwards from the challenges they face every day.”

That focus on speed, usability, and technician experience helped the solution gain traction quickly in the field.

After a successful pilot, the results spoke for themselves. Technicians quickly embraced the platform and began suggesting new use cases.  

“We’ve had hard buy-ins from our dealerships because there have been so many promises about what AI can offer,” France said. “But when they saw the demo, they knew it was something they could use in the very short term.”

With strong results and high technician adoption, Toyota is now looking to expand the solution across its North America dealer network. The next phase also includes exploring how to apply the same approach to manufacturing environments, where minimizing down time is just as important. 

“Every hour that a machine goes down on the manufacturing line can cost hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars,” France added.

This collaboration is a blueprint for how conversational AI can deliver real, measurable value in complex, high-stakes environments. It showcases NLX’s ability to turn complex challenges into intuitive, scalable solutions.

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