I was looking into why the data value of the Autocomplete control was not submitting to my controller via an ajax form and came across this article: https://www.telerik.com/forums/autocomplete-send-selected-dataitem-to-controller#-BRzEKVnbUyebqxFKYWpcA. Would it be possible in a future release to include a dataValueField option so that the value of the data item selected can be used by the controller? What's weird is this is not an issue when using the autocomplete control inside a grid. I was able to get the value and update my model.