GM OVOC — Chris Degnen

General Motors — One View of the Customer AI Platform.

GM partnered with IBM Consulting to design and deploy the One View of the Customer (OVOC) AI platform — modernizing customer data management and powering personalized engagement at scale.

Participants Across GM Units

114

Use Cases Developed

Cross-Functional Workshops

Validated CX Use Cases

Features Shipped

The challenge

GM's customer data was fragmented across dozens of disconnected systems. Without a unified view, it was impossible to deliver the personalized experiences modern drivers expect — and the business felt it: missed subscription revenue, poor trial-to-conversion rates, and a growing gap between what GM knew about their customers and what they could actually do with that knowledge.

They needed a customer-centric approach to capture, quantify, and prioritize demand through the initiative — identifying the link between user behaviors and business value, and laying the groundwork to validate desired outcomes at scale.

The solution

We unified GM's fragmented customer data into a single AI-powered decisioning engine.

The One View of The Customer Platform (OVOC) is a modern information and data architecture solution that creates customer-centric event data — delivering personalized, timely, and frictionless experiences across every GM touchpoint, from the vehicle itself to the OnStar advisor to the dealership relationship.

We ran 20 workshops, conducted 28 validation sessions, and developed 114 use cases across four workstreams — then ruthlessly prioritized them down to 4 validated CX use cases, each backed by prototypes and end-to-end future-state journeys ready for engineering delivery.

The platform was built on four interconnected capabilities:

🔗

Unified Data Layer

Connected fragmented data sources — Axciom, C360, OnStar, Siebel, My Rewards — into a single customer-centric view across GM's enterprise, enabling a complete picture of every driver for the first time.

🤖

AI Decisioning Engine

Powered next best action, real-time contextual offers, and personalized content delivery based on individual customer behavior, vehicle data, and lifecycle stage — shifting GM from reactive to predictive.

🗺️

Customer Journey Design

End-to-end future-state journey maps across the full vehicle ownership lifecycle — acquisition, onboarding, engagement, renewal, and advocacy — each validated with real users and tied to measurable business outcomes.

📈

LTV Use Case Framework

A prioritization model linking customer lifetime value to specific experience investments — enabling GM to make confident, data-backed decisions about where to focus design and engineering resources for maximum return.

What I did

As Executive Design Director and IBM Garage Program Lead, I led the end-to-end experience design — from use case mapping and platform strategy through product design and production handoff to develop and evaluate strategically aligned use cases for GM OVOC.

What we delivered

A next-generation connected vehicle platform delivering four validated CX use cases — Personalized Over-The-Air Vehicle Enhancements, Intelligent Part Recommendations, Predictive Service Actions, and Real-Time Route Monitoring — all unified through a shared real-time data architecture that transforms customer data into proactive value at every touchpoint.

Measurable impact and value delivered

🗺️

Strategic Alignment at Scale

114 use cases documented and prioritized — creating a shared design mandate across engineering, product, and operations that eliminated misalignment and accelerated delivery across a large cross-functional organization.

🚀

Production-Shipped Features

5 features from the OVOC initiative shipped to production — including the OnStar Guardian App, which reached millions of subscribers and established a new consumer touchpoint for the GM brand.

📈

Platform Transformation

Shifted OnStar from a purely reactive emergency service to a proactive, AI-assisted connected vehicle platform — laying the foundation for GM's next generation of mobility services and subscription revenue.