The Future of Automotive: Driven by People, Powered by Digital

So, the way of the modern workplace has to look a lot different. We need to adopt cloud and AI to make the infrastructure and business processes more robust, reliable, and scalable.

The automotive revenue pool will significantly increase and diversify toward on-demand mobility services and data- driven services. What are your thoughts on this growing trend?

There will be more players designing the apps that can address the spare time that the driver will have; the driver needs to be engaged inside the vehicle, and it can become a workplace extension. Depending upon what mode you’re in, you could be conducting business or watching a movie. Personalization is also essential, and that’s where AI is serving the needs of customers’ preferences based on their history, experience, and interactions. A whole new set of applications will be emerging in the driver monitoring area— monitoring physiological conditions, fatigue, and attentiveness before we attain the full autonomy.

What are the major tasks for organizational CIOs at this point in time?

The level of software usage in the vehicles is on the rise, so we need to support our product development organizations and bring in agile methodologies, traceability and CI/CD to develop faster turnaround times for reliable, scalable and secure software development. For a CIO, the next step is to bring AI into the company infrastructure. Even for a simple task such as ensuring networks are up and running optimally, there should be machine learning algorithms that know that on any given time of the day, this is my traffic pattern.

One other thing that CIOs have to do is to adopt cloud for their software and infrastructure, because it is cost effective and much more scalable. Most importantly, the cloud is changing the organization culture, where, traditionally, we would deploy big software like ERP, CRM, and PLM on premise, and tend to customize them with little governance. Once customized, you lose the ability to upgrade periodically and keep up with product vendor innovations.

How can the convergence of disruptive technology-driven trends transform the auto industry?

There is still a bit of hesitation to fully adopt to the cloud, as the traditional automotive industry has very strong safety requirements such as ASIL. So, we need to prove that we are ready for prime time when it comes to functional safety.

The second thing is, there are a lot of people who have skills in the traditional automotive paradigm. But there is also a new breed of programmers who are good with newer skills such as deep learning and reinforced learning. We need to bridge this gap by creating an innovation mindset where these skills can be combined to work on sensor fusion, object detection and classification, path planning and control. If people see a career path and can grow into these functional expertise roles, it would be a significant accomplishment.

What is your advice for budding technologists in the automotive space?

To become more product and platform centric. We need to align with the transformation of our industry. Visteon started out being a seating, climate control, and cluster manufacturer, and now we are a top-notch player in the autonomous vehicle space.

The transformation, the business, is not waiting for us. We need to do three things in the automotive space—become energized, take care of our infrastructure, and make sure that our platforms enable innovation. We need to adopt newer trends, such as smart factories, so that we can provide complete traceability to the products that are ending up on the road. We need to make ourselves more efficient by improving plant operations, aspiring to control quality, and predicting issues much sooner in the life-cycle so they don’t become much more expensive problems later.