Now any parking lot — or wherever a vehicle might be located that catches a consumer’s attention — could be the opening place where a potential buyer begins down a road toward possible delivery at your dealership.

On Wednesday, artificial intelligence platform CarStory announced the launch of CarStory Vision, a dedicated automotive visual search product for consumers. CarStory Vision uses machine learning to identify vehicles and a patented recommendation engine to help consumers discover their next vehicle.

“One of the biggest problems in the automotive industry is vehicle discovery,” said Chad Bockius, president and chief product officer of CarStory. “With CarStory Vision, we’ve tapped into the power of machine learning to enable faster, easier and a more enjoyable way to discover vehicles.

“Visual search also removes significant hurdles in automotive shopping by enabling consumers to experience parts of the shopping journey that previously could only be done on the lot,” Bockius continued.

“Starting today, consumers just have to see a car, scan it and start to shop. There is no easier way to discover your next car,” he went on to say.

Early leaders in the visual search field include Pinterest, Google, Amazon and Microsoft as well as a host of retailers that understand the huge opportunity visual search presents.

In 2017, a report by Joz and Moz confirmed that visual search is on the rise with 27 percent of all searches being for images. With CarStory Vision, users have a dedicated visual search product in automotive aimed at completely transforming vehicle search and shopping.

Trained on more than 5.5 billion automotive images, CarStory Vision can tap into CarStory’s patented recommendation engine and integrates with CarStory.com for quick search capabilities.

Key features of CarStory Vision include:

— Vehicle discovery: Combines computer vision and machine learning to visually identify a vehicle, making the street or any parking lot a virtual shopping lot

— Smart suggestions: Recommendations based on scanned or favorited vehicles

— Virtual garage: See every discovered car in one place

— Simple shopping: Quickly find the best deals nearby

“CarStory Vision enables consumers to discover their perfect car matches just by walking around,” the company said.

The app is available now for download in the Apple App Store.