Soon it’s very likely that fleets of specialized AI agents will influence jobs worldwide, including your car mechanic.
The growing role of AI in the automotive industry is immense, but not surprising considering the amount of data that is collected while you are driving.
During a commute to work, a software defined vehicle generates quite a bit of data that is useful, things like location, mileage, emissions, tire pressure, service history, engine performance, fuel levels and refueling activity, battery levels, speed, acceleration, braking data, seatbelt status, weather, and driving conditions, to name a few.
This amounts to, well, a lot of data.
According to a case study cited by Sonatus, by 2030 cars will generate up to 25 GB of data per hour. If autonomous vehicles are added to the calculations, the number jumps to 19 TB of data per hour.
Sonatus, an automotive software company, specializes in solutions that help car manufacturers (often called “original equipment manufacturers” or “OEMs”) with the shift to software-defined vehicles, and one of the key capabilities is how to gather, sort, and manage these mountains of data.
Recently, Sonatus added a new AI Technician Builder solution to its lineup. The AI Technician Builder is designed to help OEMs create vehicle-specific AI agents — or as Sonatus calls them, “AI Technicians” — that can give instant responses to car-related questions through a chatbot. A use case might look like a driver asking an AI chatbot, “Why is my engine running rough?” and the bot providing a detailed diagnosis.
Built In spoke with Steve Stoddard, Principal Product Manager for Sonatus, about how the product team used AI to create this new tool.
Sonatus accelerates the development of software-defined vehicles to enable the digital transformation of the automotive industry.
What is the unique story that you feel your company has with AI?
Automotive AI is actually the culmination of software-defined vehicles. Sonatus’s mission since its founding has been to accelerate the adoption of software-defined vehicles in the auto industry, enabling vehicles to be flexible, updatable, and dynamic. With AI, it now allows us to add intelligence to that list and enable compelling new capabilities that were not possible before.
What was a monumental moment for your team when it comes to your work with AI?
For some context, one of our products, Collector AI, helps OEMs collect vehicle data that enables specific inquiries and evolves them over time through event-driven collection policies. Vehicle engineers can easily create policies through a graphical user interface or, if they want, by directly editing JavaScript Object Notation code. But these approaches require detailed knowledge of the vehicle by an expert engineer.
One monumental moment was when we were also developing an AI enhancement to make it easier for more users inside the OEM, not just technical experts, to use the product. This enhancement enabled them to describe in natural language what they wanted to collect based on specific trigger conditions. While experimenting, we discovered that the tool could intelligently identify useful, relevant information that exceeded our original expectations when we wrote our queries. The AI was able to really understand the intent of the query, and we realized that AI could serve as a thought partner to our users, not only helping them to be more efficient but also helping them to do their work better. We are now rolling out this capability as a fundamental new feature of our product.
AI is a constantly evolving field. Very few people coming into these roles have years of experience to pull from. Explain what continuous learning looks like on your team. How do you learn from one another and collaborate?
We collectively read a lot. Everything from academic papers to Medium articles and blog posts to market and industry reports. We have weekly technology team sessions where team members “show and tell” on a rotating cadence over cutting-edge topics, both AI and non-AI. Team members are encouraged to attend conferences and symposia and the company supports it. The only condition is to provide a trip report presentation to share your learnings with others!
