Smart Service Guardian

Inspiration

An unexpected repair can turn car ownership into a difficult financial decision: fix your current vehicle, upgrade, or protect your savings? Inspired by Toyota Financial Services’ “What’s the next move for me and my Toyota?” challenge, we built Smart Service Guardian to help customers make that decision with confidence.

What it does

How we built it

We connected a JavaScript frontend to a FastAPI backend that calculates ownership scenarios. Snowflake supplies customer and vehicle context, Gemini turns calculated results into personalized explanations, and SerpApi retrieves nearby providers and public references. Backend checks help keep AI-generated numbers and citations grounded in the results.

Challenges we ran into

Combining customer data, financial calculations, and AI explanations required consistent assumptions across the app. We also needed to distinguish public search evidence from verified offers and ensure that the lowest-cost option did not automatically become the recommendation when it threatened a customer’s savings.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We built a working flow from comparison to explanation to a saved demo inquiry. Our strongest moment is switching between customers: the same repair produces different guidance because their financial situations differ. That makes personalization visible and useful.

What we learned

Useful financial guidance needs more than a cost comparison. Cash reserves, transparent assumptions, and an understandable next step matter too. We also learned to use generative AI to explain calculations while keeping the calculations themselves in the backend.