It was a matter of time before other fundamental industries adopted the AI trend, and Volkswagen is going hard on the trend in the automobile industry.
The German automobile manufacturer announced on Wednesday, 31 January, that its AI lab has been established to serve as a globally networked center and incubator.
This move aims to look for proof of viable artificial intelligence concepts around automobile innovations. In other words, Volkswagen aims to make their cars smarter.
“We want to offer our customers genuine added value with artificial intelligence. We aim to link external digital ecosystem with the vehicle, creating an even better product experience.
Collaboration with technology companies is crucially important for us. In the future, we intend to simplify cooperation in organizational and cultural terms.”
The CEO of the Volkswagen Group and Porsche AG, Oliver Blume
Customers would be expecting a new production model, which would come equipped with the tech. However, Volkswagen states that it’s not planning to do so. Instead, the carmaker intends to license its exclusive AI tech for its vehicles.
The company explained that the direction right now of the AI lab is to create solutions that will majorly deal with their EV (Electric Vehicles) in aspects of optimized charging, home, and car link through the internet, and most importantly, vehicle maintenance prediction—all that with enabling in-car voice recognition.
The carmaker recently announced that ChatGPT will be integrated into their cars at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which is not recent news for already existing Volkswagen EV customers.
This means heavily relying on OpenAI as a technological partner. However, with the new AI lab establishment, we should expect Volkswagen to cut the dependency soon to focus on using its proprietary tech.