Everything AI: Takeaways from Automotive Software Strategies 2024

The conference is a friendly and very collaborative community of niche experts in the industry whose opinion is extremely valued and adopted as the industry standards in the long run. That is why it is so crucially important to be a part of it.

The topics in focus at the conference included Software-Defined Architectures, Testing, Software Updates, Artificial Intelligence, Processes and Tooling within the automotive industry. However, among all topics there was one that reigned the stage this year, pushing aside even the last year’s leader Software Defined Vehicles (SDV). I’m sure you will easily guess the technology that occupies the minds of many experts in various domains – Artificial Intelligence.

Speakers addressed the technology applications, challenges, and benefits from different sides.

Jan Zawadzki, CTO & Co-MD, CertifAI GmbH, believes that AI has the potential to transform products across all business units in the automotive industry. The key to it is AI-based development. It has the potential to optimize production workflows, quality assurance, and predictive maintenance. At the same time, it can change the ways of users’ interaction with their vehicles as well as impact companies’ HR, sales, and planning processes.

He underlined that although AI is a big hype at the moment, the adoption curve of AI tools within the organizations is much lower than it is being talked about. Nevertheless, the strategy of AI tools usage to increase the development speed is now the biggest and most relevant approach. It is not discussed anymore whether to use AI productivity boosters, it is discussed on what areas and which.

Productivity boosters we use in Sigma Software

Dr. Patrick Bartsch, Principal Technology Evangelist, Amazon Web Services, suggests moving further and using Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)-enabled GenAI to achieve faster software development.

As Dr. Bartsch puts it, “GenAI without RAG is like a new employee, with RAG like an experienced guru.”

To make it even more interesting, we are expecting a wave of regulations to be adopted in many countries to control the use of AI. The EU AI Act (AIA) is expected to come into force in 2024 with penalties up to 35 million euros to be applied from June 2025.

That is something that we need to start thinking about right now.

Participants also explored the architecture and business models of SDVs, importance of software lifecycle management, its tools and processes in connected vehicles, uprising interest in open source for SDV, software architectures, as well as the challenges of software updates in an increasingly complex automotive ecosystem.

My colleague Vlad Beck, Co-founder of Sigma Software, and I made a presentation of Sigma Software as an experienced automotive software development partner, supporting 13 OEMs with digitalization services, product development, cloud enablement, and traditional IT services.

It is a great honor to be a part of this community for the 2nd year in a row. It considerably fosters the focus and calibration of Sigma Software Group services, namely CI/CD, Software Factory, GenAI, transition to Rust, etc. within the automotive industry.

I thank Anne von Türckheim-Horch and the program committee for the organization and selection of great speeches!

• #AI/ML
• #Automotive