Sustainability is AI’s new frontier for auto and manufacturing companies

I recently had the pleasure of delivering a keynote address at STARTUP AUTOBAHN Expo2024 in Stuttgart, Germany. The forum featured some of the most innovative startups in the automotive industry, and what inspired me the most was the buzz around innovations aligned to the importance of sustainability in vehicle manufacturing. Whether you are creating autonomous driving solutions, integrating with smart city infrastructure, or building in-car connectivity and infotainment systems — sustainability must be at the heart of these pursuits. We believe that having a sustainability mindset from the onset gives you the right design thinking to decide how your resources should be allocated. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1. Next-generation sustainable auto technology

To make the right sustainability decisions, companies need to leverage artificial intelligence (AI). 

Each partner, group, process, and function often operates in different languages, which can make it extremely difficult to reach important decisions quickly and to resonate for your customers.

AI is a crucial tool for processing complex information in various languages, enabling you to connect the vast, "pixelated dots" of data into a coherent picture. We believe that AI — when used responsibly — has the ability to help alleviate the disconnected data sources so business can derive value for informed decision making, with speed and accuracy. It ensures you design solutions correctly and communicate effectively in different languages. By leveraging AI, startups can focus on the right projects and tailor their solutions to resonate with diverse customers. For instance, a materials management lead may emphasize sustainability, while a supply chain professional focuses on after-market issues. AI helps position your solution to address these varied concerns effectively.

Beyond the potential of AI for innovation, it can also help automotive manufacturers with the increasing number of environmental regulations coming into force worldwide, such as waste reduction for end-of-life vehicles (ELV) and aligning with materials compliance and supply chain environmental requirements.

What’s more, GenAI’s capabilities in the sustainability realm are largely untapped, which gives you a huge opportunity to innovate. DXC Technology has created a framework that can help define hundreds of Generative AI use cases and also define the maturity of specific areas, to help our customers understand where they are on their journey. 

DXC has been delivering AI-enabled solutions for customers across industries, from insurance and retail, to automotive, airlines and beyond. 

• DXC Robotic Drive, our platform for autonomous vehicle development, uses our data and AI expertise to simulate training scenarios with synthetic data derived from on-road tests, thereby reducing fuel consumption and emissions resulting from repeated runs of test cars to feed AI models with additional data.
• We are partnering with leading infrastructure company Ferrovial — which constructs tunnels, airports, and roadways — to build an AI workbench for their R&D team. The solution not only helps their researchers explore the best materials for sustainable roads that require only light maintenance, but also to monitor traffic flow. We, in turn, can leverage the traffic behavior pattern data generated from this research to inform our work on sustainable autonomous driving, smart cities and more. For example, connecting road data with vehicle data can dynamically optimize vehicle performance and reduce emissions.
• In addition, DXC is working with Ferrovial and Microsoft together, to develop the GenAI platform Quercus for integrating secure, responsible, bespoke AI solutions.
  
• We collaborated with the R&D team of a large German manufacturer to build an autonomous driving platform, where we leveraged both open source and proprietary solutions from big and small companies, large language models (LLMs) and small language models (SLMs) alike. We are continually evolving and innovating that platform: We’re using Generative AI, taking real-time data about driving conditions and overlaying LLMs with different weather, lighting or traffic congestion conditions, so that we can model car travel time at speed under any circumstance. The R&D teams at the manufacturer can use that data analysis to upgrade the software in their vehicles, determine how their cars connect with other providers’ data (such as data from sensor companies) and more to further refine outcomes.

Innovating for our customers is in our DNA, and we recognize the transformative potential of AI and the difference it can make to the way we deliver excellence across all industries. The automotive sector, in particular, holds a growing  opportunity to harness AI for significant impact, especially in driving sustainability initiatives. At the core of our approach lies a steadfast dedication to trust and data governance, ensuring that our partnerships with customers foster innovation responsibly and effectively. By leveraging AI, we not only enhance operational efficiency but also pave the way for a more sustainable future in the auto industry and beyond.

Learn more about DXC Data & AI and Generative AI.