Four Trends Shaping Digital Transformation in the Automotive Industry

The automotive industry is in the midst of transformative change led by innovations in cloud technology. In a world where consumers expect a seamless shopping experience, desire for mobility options, and their automobile to be as personalized as their smartphone, we can expect the pace of change in the automotive space to accelerate. AWS helps automotive customers lead that change with expertise in four key areas:

New Technologies
New technologies such as AIML and High Performance Computing (HPC) are enabling new automotive applications and services – such as simple use cases to communicate road conditions, to more complex edge enabled uses cases for Autonomous Driving (ADAS). Customers like Toyota Research Institute use AWS to apply the latest advancements in artificial intelligence to help Toyota produce cars that are safer, more accessible, and more environmentally friendly. By using AWS’ EC2 P3 instances, Toyota is seeing a 4x faster time-to-train than the P2 instances they had used previously, reducing their training time from days to hours. This gives TRI-AD significant agility to optimize and retrain their models quickly and to deploy them in their test cars or simulation environments for further testing. In addition, the significant performance improvement in P3 instances over P2 instances, coupled with the AWS pay-as-you-go model, translates to lower operating costs for TRI.

Data
An auto OEM with the ability to discover, unlock, and share data across customer touch points can develop actionable insights and new product features. For example, rich datasets in automotive today come from the vehicle itself, smart cities where the vehicle is operating, in the AV training and simulation models, and from the manufacturing process. One major challenge to connected vehicle adoption from OEMs is messy data coming from varied sensors—which is why despite over one billion vehicles on the road today, only around 50 million are connected. This is where AWS Cloud can help. For example, Autonomic built its Transportation Mobility Cloud (TMC) on AWS.  The purpose of the Transportation Mobility Cloud is to “Decode that data, normalize it, and put it in a single format so any user can take advantage of this clean, crisp, developer-friendly data all in one place” says Gavin Sherry, CEO of Autonomic. “When I think of Amazon Web Services, ultimately, I think of a company that is accelerating my business,” says Sherry.

Industrial IoT
A truly connected enterprise is the ultimate goal of an automotive company that is mature in its digital transformation. Through the use of data lakes, enterprises can gain valuable insights of what is happening with vehicles on the road. They can then share these insights back to the manufacturing and design teams to create operational efficiencies, improve quality and accelerate innovation. This advancement in technology can also impact smart factories, by enabling industrial automation to use ML at the edge to analyze images and video to detect quality issues on fast moving assembly lines. Customers like Volkswagen, who are using the cloud to efficiently process data, will be able to improve their total operations from supplier to end vehicle to realize efficiencies of 30%.

Culture
Many automakers are well on their way of transforming their business culture from legacy metal works to software-driven technology companies. To do this requires expertise and insights on what makes an innovative business culture. Amazon’s culture has digital in our DNA, and as automakers strive to nurture a culture of digital innovation, there are many lessons we can share. From our focus on hiring and retaining top talent to working backwards to solve business issues, Amazon’s mission “To be the earth’s most customer-centric company” and practices like our Bar Raiser program have been named by Gartner in their Sept 2020 report “How to Become the Digital Automaker of the Future.” In a world where agile development, rapid deployment and unlimited scale are the new normal, AWS automotive can help our customers succeed in their digital transformation journey.

The stages of enterprise business and culture transformation from on-prem to cloud native

How to Become the Digital Automaker of the Future, Pedro Pacheco, Michael Ramsey, Gartner

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