Tag: Automotive

We are excited to announce that Microsoft will be a featured exhibitor at CES 2023, taking place January 5 to 8, 2023 in Las Vegas, Nevada, and virtually. Known as the “most influential tech event in the world,” CES hosts what has become the place to experience innovation in the automotive and mobility industry, with a “vehicle technology” topic area and dedicated exhibition hall specific to this space. Microsoft will present exciting representations of the future of mobility and innovation including:

• Metaverse and the future of car buying.
• Mixed reality transforming service and customer experiences.
• Connected, autonomous, and software-defined mobility.

The theme for CES 2023 is “Human Security for All” and intends to highlight how innovations in sustainability, transportation and mobility, digital health, and the metaverse are addressing the world’s greatest challenges.

In a CES Insider Look video, Sanjay Ravi, General Manager, Automotive, Mobility, and Transportation Industry, highlights some of the key disruptions, and innovations creating what he termed a “once-in-a-century transformation.” The common industry goals of Connected, Autonomous, Shared mobility, and Electrification (CASE) have expanded into more impactful end goals of improving the societal, sustainability, and safety impact of mobility and improving the interactive and connected experiences that make our daily lives more productive and enjoyable.

Microsoft is working closely with our customers, partners, and the community and enabling them to drive the future of mobility. Data and AI are playing an increasing role in mobility. In a recent podcast interview, Sanjay talked with Alex Kendall, CEO of Wayve, who is advancing the safety and testing of autonomous vehicle technology using AI.

Transportation and aviation also featured at CES, are navigating their own roadmap to the future with a keen focus on sustainability. Contributing to more than one-third of all carbon emissions globally, we see nearly all players finding unique ways to reduce this impact, including an Alaska Airlines and Microsoft partnership to help the advancement of Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) in key routes. Along with our customers and partners, we highlight our own emphasis on sustainability to be carbon negative by 2030, and by 2050 to remove our historical emissions since our founding in 1975. In addition, Microsoft is helping our customers fulfill their sustainability mission with Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability.

Innovation must lead from trust, data sovereignty, and cybersecurity and these are the core foundations at the center of empowerment for our customers and partners. Over the next five years, we are investing more than USD20 billion to continue the expansion of our cybersecurity capabilities, an imperative in our increasingly connected world.

Microsoft at CES 2023

The Microsoft CES theme of “Drive the future of mobility” embodies our vision to empower—not compete with—the industry to shape our mobility future. It is often out of duress that innovation sparks and grows. And there’s no doubt that the larger global ecosystem is under great pressure from both macro and micro influences. Organizations and individuals are having to do more when more may not always be readily available.

But as we’ve seen, the human resolve is strong and perhaps more vibrant than ever given our recent challenges. Part of the CES mission is to expose this resolve and technical prowess to the world as innovation will power us forward. Once again, we join the global community to showcase and celebrate the impact of innovation in automotive, mobility, and transportation at CES.

Subject to modifications, we are supporting these industry endeavors across five key areas:

1. Empowered Organization

To lead external transformation, organizations must first transform internally. The pandemic created unique opportunities to improve inter and intra-organizational productivity, ushering in an opportunity to drive efficiencies through a diverse, inclusive, and hybrid workforce. Here we will showcase the impact these trends have on accelerating transformation of productivity, frontline workers, citizen development, and most importantly, security.

Key showcase:

• Lynk & Co.: Improving enterprise efficiency isn’t the only area of focus companies have. That efficiency is now extended to the vehicle and leveraged through Microsoft Teams to bring on-the-go, safe, and efficient productivity integration while keeping eyes on the road.  

2. Resilient Operations

We have all been directly impacted by the vital links to a global supply chain and operations. Whether as a consumer, supplier, or someplace in between, improving operations is a key focus. Companies must find ways to create sustainable, agile, and collaborative supply chains that improve visibility and resilience. Many may not know that Microsoft operates a significant global manufacturing and supply chain operation. That experience along with our partner ecosystem has enabled our customers to drive rapid transformation in operations.

Key showcase:

• Creating resilient, sustainable supply chains with Microsoft Supply Chain Platform.
• Factory supply chain transformation with PwC and ZF and the creation of the ZF cloud in partnership with Microsoft as a platform for innovation across factories, products, and services.
• Powering the future of electric vehicles (EVs) with Rockwell and advanced battery technology leveraging the Internet of Things (IoT), mixed reality, and product lifestyle management (PLM) integration to power the electrification of mobility.

3. Accelerate Innovation

At the core of transformation is the need to innovate. Disruptions impacting the industry have created a sense of urgency creating rapid transformation opportunities that are truly moving the industry forward at a rapid pace in many areas.

Here we highlight:

• Autonomous simulation with Ansys and Applied Intuition enables advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous vehicles (AV) engineering and product teams to safely develop, test, and deploy autonomous vehicles at scale.
• AI, cognitive services, and the future of in-car interactions with General Motors (with the all-electric Cadillac LYRIQ in-car demonstration at the General Motors booth).
• Developing the future of software-defined vehicles with Eclipse Foundation.

4. Customer Experience

A benefit of transformation at its core is creating engaging experiences that build long-term value for the customer. After all, the customer is the ultimate beneficiary of technological advances in mobility. Whether it is integration with entertainment, productivity, sales, or service—opportunities are being created that offer unique, connected, and immersive experiences.

Examples include:

5. Mobility Services

Traditional automotive, transportation, and logistics providers see themselves as part of a larger mobility ecosystem, not just creators of a product to move throughout it. Mobility is vibrant with blurred lines between old and new business models, and the creation of entirely new categories that address the future needs for the movement of people and goods.

A significant enabler of mobility services is the introduction of Microsoft Connect Fleets. A new reference architecture that creates an interconnected ecosystem of partners and makes use of common architecture, data models, and business applications from the Microsoft Cloud. Look for this announcement at CES and visit the booth to learn more.

Here we represent:

• Turning connected vehicle data intelligence into actionable insights and business system integration for efficient fleet management operations with Connected Fleets, a Microsoft reference architecture. Learn how Accenture utilized Connected Fleets with the campus Connector transportation system at Microsoft campus headquarters to improve mobility options and efficiency.
• Enhanced visibility of vehicle data and insights through Connected Cars and Wejo, offering insights from more than 13 million active vehicles and 18 trillion data points.
• EV charging management as demonstrated by HCLTech, enhanced by the Connected Fleets reference architecture.

Learn more

If you’ll be in Las Vegas for CES 2023, stop by and visit us in booth #6017 in the Las Vegas Convention Center West Hall for hands-on, immersive experiences and an opportunity to talk with mobility experts from many of our customers and partners.

To learn more about Microsoft in automotive, mobility, and transportation, visit the Future of Automotive Industry Solutions homepage.

The amount of hype around the metaverse is overwhelming

It has been 30 years since author Neal Stephenson’s sci-fi novel Snow Crash appeared and the term metaverse was coined. During that timeframe, we have seen the launch of online networks that embody many of the metaverse’s most important concepts, without ever using the term.

The rebranding of Facebook to Meta in October 2021 significantly increased metaverse conversation, and the hype has been driven by a variety of technology players preemptively claiming to be metaverse companies or to be creating a metaverse.

Metaverse is one of the latest technology buzzwords to hit the headlines. What is it and will it revolutionize everything? The answer is yes, no, and maybe. Is it simply the latest phase in the evolution of business transformation? Certainly, the metaverse expands the traditional notion of an ecosystem into a 21st-century virtual business, social, and collaborative interaction space.

I hope to shed a bit of light and stimulate conversation about this latest evolution of the internet.

What is the metaverse?

According to Matthew Ball—venture capitalist and author—the metaverse is a massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time rendered 3D virtual worlds that can be experienced synchronously and persistently by an effectively unlimited number of users with an individual sense of presence, and with continuity of data, such as identity, history, entitlements, objects, communications, and payments.¹

We see it as a set of technologies that allow for persistent digital representation, connected to aspects of the real world. Meta means, “beyond,” and verse means “universe.” Together, the metaverse refers to a virtual world parallel to the real world that can be experienced more completely with technologies such as augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). These virtual worlds will connect to a social system and fully functioning economy in which data, digital goods, content, and intellectual property (IP) can pass, and individual users, organizations, and companies can create content and goods to ensure that the metaverse continues to expand and evolve.

In 2014, Microsoft acquired Mojang Studios, which launched Minecraft, for $2.5 billion (about $8 per person in the United States) and over time, made virtual reality versions available on Oculus Rift, PlayStation, and Microsoft HoloLens.

The beauty of Minecraft is that like Lego blocks, it offers infinite possibilities within an infinite digital space to allow anyone to create their own metaverse. With over 130 million monthly users, Minecraft is but one early example of the metaverse impacting our daily lives.

The metaverse: An evolution of the internet

The metaverse will not fundamentally replace the internet, but instead, build upon and iteratively transform it. It is a logical evolution of the internet. Just like fixed-line internet ushered in the age of personal computing and mobile internet increased the proliferation of content and access to the internet, the metaverse will place everyone inside a “virtual” version of the internet on a continuous basis. It will enable us to constantly be “within” the internet, creating more immediate experiences.

Technology is extending the imagination boundary

From a technical standpoint, the building blocks of the metaverse, VR, AR, AI, and blockchain are rapidly evolving. VR enables the use of computer simulation to generate a three-dimensional space of the virtual world, and a way to provide the user the visual and other sensory stimulation to feel as if they are in the real world.

Identity and the economic system will leverage blockchain technology to establish credibility. As a distributed database or ledger shared among computer network nodes, blockchain guarantees the accuracy and security of a record of data without the need for a trusted third party.

To ensure the plurality of the metaverse, edge computing technology is needed to ensure a consistent experience for all users.

Metaverse use cases

A quick web search for metaverse shows increased mentions across the entire mobility sector. Microsoft is also active in this space by supporting both the consumer and industrial metaverse. A recent announcement mentioned how Microsoft and Meta are partnering to deliver immersive experiences for the future of work and play. And, at the Microsoft Ignite conference in September, examples of current industrial metaverse applications were shared, like Kawasaki Heavy Industries demonstrating metaverse enabling collaborative spaces for engineers, service technicians, and frontline workers utilizing the Internet of Things (IoT), digital twins, and mixed reality.

Metaverse in automotive

We see the convergence of digital and physical worlds evolving in the automotive industry in areas including virtual vehicle design and physical production, led by real-time collaboration on engineering design and materials.

In manufacturing and supply chain operations, the metaverse and digital twin models are enabling rapid production processes that require significantly less physical testing, improving efficiency. This results in reduced risk and improved quality control with detailed, physics-based designs to shrink the margin of error for production. A metaverse-based digital twin can also be used to streamline and optimize supply chain management, from product design through procurement, manufacturing, and inventory.

With vehicle sales, the metaverse is bridging the gap between the dealership and customers opting for online purchasing. 2D and 3D solutions in this space are offering virtual viewing of vehicles, test drives, and explanations of complex technology features to create a more fluid customer journey and buying experience for consumers.

Opportunities to enhance the in-car customer experience are also being explored. Entertainment, gaming, and productivity are all potential opportunities that can engage vehicle occupants where appropriate. When it comes to service, the metaverse is accelerating the upskill of existing technicians and enabling remote virtual diagnostics and repair of vehicles. This touchless, frictionless approach will result in greater customer satisfaction to improved customer retention.

Metaverse in transportation

While some argue that the metaverse will enable more satisfying virtual social interaction and therefore less need for physical mobility, others look towards a more efficient multi-modal mobility future.

The metaverse will enable intelligently networked, constantly evolving, and integrated multi-modal transportation networks. By leveraging digital twins of physical infrastructure like airports and major roadway systems, all the way down to transit infrastructure, the coordination of transporting people and goods will improve dramatically. With AI automation dynamically creating less friction between origins, stops, and destinations, travelers will plan and execute journeys across multiple transportation modes in an increasingly more cost-effective and efficient manner as these services become part of the larger metaverse network.

Metaverse in travel and hospitality

While the metaverse cannot replace travel, it can enable the travel industry to provide enhanced experiences and the opportunity to engage with the customer more deeply with new and unexpected adventures.

The metaverse will help the hospitality business meet evolving guest expectations. In the area of pre-travel planning, a virtual concierge can enable travelers to take virtual, three-dimensional walkthroughs of hotel room options, airport terminals, destinations, and attractions. The objective will be to provide travelers with options and a clear idea of what they might expect when they visit their destination. This will enhance the booking experience, improve guest satisfaction, and increase booking volume.

Status—where are we now?

As I have shared, there are several examples of actual metaverse scenarios impacting the industry today. There are also many opportunities yet to be explored as the technology is still in its initial stages. As these examples continue to develop, we see metaverse experiences classified as industrial or consumer metaverse, further defining the intended applications. In either application, removing walled gardens is important to ensure continued growth and adoption. This means that the metaverse will require a mutually agreed-upon set of underlying standards that make it possible for people to live, work, and play in the metaverse together and to move between different instances with persistent digital identities and profiles.

Other key elements will include the creator economy, universally accepted rules of behavior, recognition of digital currencies and a means of converting them into real-world currencies, digital object ownership rights, security standards and processes, and Web 3.0.

Web 3.0 and the metaverse

In Web 1.0, internet browsers connected everyone online. Web 2.0 extended this connectivity and has revolutionized the availability, speed, and access to information and transformed the way we connect and interact with people and the world around us.

Web 3.0 is known as the next generation of the internet. It will introduce new capabilities such as blockchain with aspirations to become more equitable, transparent, and decentralized, concentrating the power (and data) in the hands of users, instead of entities. It will analyze, understand, intelligently integrate, and interpret information to provide users with an enhanced, hyper-personalized, and interactive experience.

While Web 3.0 is focused on who will own and control tomorrow’s decentralized internet, the metaverse is focused on new ways in which users will experience the internet of the future. Web 3.0 and the metaverse complement each other, with Web 3.0 serving as the basis for connectivity in the metaverse, and the creator economy in the metaverse supplementing the vision of Web 3.0.

What’s next

We have only begun to scratch the surface of possibilities with the metaverse. It will continue to be an evolving platform that will dramatically change the way we interact with the world around us. From an industrial metaverse or consumer metaverse point of view, we see growing interest, application, and exploration of metaverse capabilities in the broader mobility industry, and with adjacent industries like retail, banking and insurance, and energy as well. The future may well be shaped by the visions created within the metaverse today.

---

¹Framework for the Metaverse, The Metaverse Primer, MatthewBall.vc.

About Volocopter  

Volocopter brings urban air mobility (UAM) to megacities worldwide. We aim to improve the quality of life for people in cities by offering a fantastic new mode of transportation. For that, we create sustainable and scalable UAM ecosystems with partners in infrastructure and operations.

Volocopter’s family of eVTOL aircraft will offer passengers (VoloCity and VoloConnect) and goods (VoloDrone) swift, secure, and emission-free connections to their destinations, supported by VoloIQ, the UAM ecosystem’s software platform that serves as its digital backbone for safe and efficient operations.

As a pioneer in the UAM industry, Volocopter will launch commercial services within the next few years. Founded in 2011, the company employs more than 500 people in Germany and Singapore, has completed over 1,500 successful public and private test flights, and raised $579 million in equity from investors, including Geely, WP Investment, Mercedes-Benz Group, Intel Capital, and BlackRock. www.volocopter.com 

Let’s momentarily exit 2020 and pay an imaginary visit to 2029.

(If only we could, right? Anyway, back to our mental trek.)

Picture the world’s cities by the end of this decade: Streets, intersections and roundabouts are a safer, cleaner, quieter and vastly more organized stream of connected, self-driving electric vehicles. Block by block, their shared “driving brain” learns from roadway experiences to make traffic deaths tragedies of our messy past.

Rush hour jams? No chance. Horns? No need. Road rage? No more.

That’s how Alex Kendall sees our urban future. Kendall is the co-founder and CEO of Wayve, a London-based startup that’s building an artificial intelligence (AI) solution that will enable autonomous vehicles to operate not in a single city but in any urban environment, securely moving people and goods.

His vision blends cloud and artificial intelligence capabilities with heavy doses of human equity and healthy air to deliver a new transportation model that will be sustainable, affordable and accessible to people in all cities. He calls it: “Riding the Wayve.”

“One of our values is to leave positive tracks,” Kendall says, “so we exclusively work on electric vehicles.”

To scale their solution, the three-year-old company is leveraging both Microsoft Azure and the Microsoft for Startups: Autonomous Driving program, which provides benefits like free Azure credits and access to Microsoft engineers and program managers to support the development of these complex workloads on the cloud.

Transform recently chatted with Kendall via Microsoft Teams to hear about our commutes of tomorrow.

TRANSFORM: Autonomous driving means different things to different people. What does it mean to you?

 KENDALL: It means the start of a new era, creating artificial intelligence that we trust to move people and goods throughout our cities without requiring supervision by humans. We’re talking about a world of autonomous mobility services that disrupts private car ownership, that makes it more sustainable for people to move around cities and, ultimately, that reduces road deaths to zero.

TRANSFORM: Wayve aims to be the first company to launch its self-driving technology in 100 cities, not just one city. Tell me about that goal.

 KENDALL: Across the self-driving industry today, many teams are trying to make it work in one place, just trying to get something out there as quickly as they can. This comes at the expense of what we call “generalization”: How quickly can the system go from working in one place to many places?

When humans learn to drive, they go from understanding how to drive in one city to quickly learning how to drive in other cities. In that same way, scaling our technology to other cities should just be a matter of adding a small amount of experience to adapt to each new place.

TRANSFORM: Where are some of those 100 projected cities?

KENDALL: We’re headquartered in London. That will be our first city. Beyond the UK, we are most excited about targeting a few cities in Europe as next expansion points. Next countries include the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany.

TRANSFORM: You mentioned how humans learn to drive. What does that mean?

 KENDALL: Humans are interesting because they use many means of learning to learn how to drive. The dominant one is unsupervised learning. That is how humans watch and view the world.

Every time you’re sitting in a car or observing cars driving, you’re building an internal mental model about how things behave, how things move, how things interact. When you actually get in a car, it’s this internal model that makes it efficient for you to learn how to drive.

TRANSFORM: How will Wayve’s machine learning system mimic the human process?

KENDALL: Just like humans, our system learns most efficiently using many sources, including unsupervised learning, imitation learning and reinforcement learning.

First, we learn to drive (autonomously) by copying expert humans. We record the driving data from their vehicles. Based on the data, we learn to copy their expert driving. This is called imitation learning.

From that, we build a self-driving system and deploy it on the roads with safety drivers. (These are people who sit behind the steering wheel during testing and, if needed, immediately take control.) Every time the system makes a mistake, and the safety driver intervenes, we learn from that feedback. This is called reinforcement learning.

Finally, we use computer simulation to learn from the situations that are too dangerous or too rare to experience in the real world. Through these three steps, we build a safe and robust autonomous driver.

TRANSFORM: Who are the expert drivers that you mentioned, and how do you record their driving data?

KENDALL:  We deploy our self-driving platform with data-collection devices across large scale-commercial fleets.

We provide these vehicles with data-collection computers – fully integrated, self-driving, sensing suites – and small computers with a 4G connection. Integrated with Azure cloud and IoT services, this allows us to understand this data and send back interesting examples to the cloud, ultimately for our system to learn from.  At scale, this will provide us access to millions of images per second.

TRANSFORM: In your computer simulations, are you estimating the accident rates?

 KENDALL: We’ve built a scalable (simulation) system to extract insights from every part of the drive. We classify these into scenarios and look at the metrics for each one, whether that’s driving through traffic lights or going through a roundabout in the rain.

It gives us a good view on what we are and aren’t good at – and where we should focus our resources and our learning.

Within each of these scenarios, we can accurately estimate human-level performances and what we need to beat. For example, humans can pass through roundabout intersections without an accident causing injury 99.999 percent of the time. We want to be able to surpass this.

TRANSFORM: What has the Microsoft for Startups: Autonomous Driving program meant for your company and achieving your vision?

 KENDALL: In the early days, we were building an autonomous car in our garage, driving it around the block and testing it.

We had nothing to show and everything to prove. Despite that, Microsoft was excited about what we were building. This early engagement was critical. More than the financial credit support, the engineering support around the backend and the quick turnaround to our requests and questions allowed us to get that speed of iteration we needed.

Because we had this speed of iteration, we were able to quickly graduate from a house and build a headquarters and an organization that ultimately decided to build our infrastructure at scale in Azure.

TRANSFORM: When your technology is fully deployed, how will this look in the real world?

 KENDALL: We envision a world where we have large fleets of connected vehicles, all sharing experiences to improve and train a driving brain that ultimately learns from its mistakes and learns to adapt to society’s needs at a rapid pace.

TRANSFORM: And this self-driving network will be available to all who want to use it?

 KENDALL: Yes, for people who are disabled, self-driving is a technology that should massively increase their mobility options. It should reduce the stigma and the cost (of today’s accessible transportation options).

Also, I don’t want to see self-driving only deployed in affluent areas with expensive infrastructure. I want to see self-driving address urban societies throughout the world. This requires a more intelligent autonomous driving system which is able to understand the world around it. This is only possible with machine learning.

TRANSFORM: When might this become part of everyday life?

KENDALL: Over the next few years, Wayve will get to a point where we have the safety case in place, where we’ll invite members of the public to experience riding the Wayve. They will do this, first, with a safety driver supervising the ride, then as an autonomous service.

By the end of this decade, I think riding the Wayve will be dominant within the multimodal transportation options we use in cities throughout the world. It will just be a matter of time before it is as prevalent as today’s ride-hailing services.

Top photo: Alex Kendall. (All photos courtesy of Wayve.)

This post was co-authored by the extended Azure Mobility Team.

The past year has been eventful for a lot of reasons. At Microsoft, we’ve expanded our partnerships, including Volkswagen, LG Electronics, Faurecia, TomTom, and more, and taken the wraps off new thinking such as at CES, where we recently demonstrated our approach to in-vehicle compute and software architecture.

Looking ahead, areas that were once nominally related now come into sharper focus as the supporting technologies are deployed and the various industry verticals mature. The welcoming of a new year is a good time to pause and take in what is happening in our industry and in related ones with an aim to developing a view on where it’s all heading.

In this blog, we will talk about the trends that we see in connected vehicles and smart cities and describe how we see ourselves fitting in and contributing.

Trends

Mobility as a Service (Maas)

MaaS (sometimes referred to as Transportation as a Service, or TaaS) is about people getting to goods and services and getting those goods and services to people. Ride-hailing and ride-sharing come to mind, but so do many other forms of MaaS offerings such as air taxis, autonomous drone fleets, and last-mile delivery services. We inherently believe that completing a single trip—of a person or goods—will soon require a combination of passenger-owned vehicles, ride-sharing, ride-hailing, autonomous taxis, bicycle-and scooter-sharing services transporting people on land, sea, and in the air (what we refer to as “multi-modal routing”). Service offerings that link these different modes of transportation will be key to making this natural for users.

With Ford, we are exploring how quantum algorithms can help improve urban traffic congestion and develop a more balanced routing system. We’ve also built strong partnerships with TomTom for traffic-based routing as well as with AccuWeather for current and forecast weather reports to increase awareness of weather events that will occur along the route. In 2020, we will be integrating these routing methods together and making them available as part of the Azure Maps service and API. Because mobility constitutes experiences throughout the day across various modes of transportation, finding pickup locations, planning trips from home and work, and doing errands along the way, Azure Maps ties the mobility journey with cloud APIs and iOS and Android SDKs to deliver in-app mobility and mapping experiences. Coupled with the connected vehicle architecture of integration with federated user authentication, integration with the Microsoft Graph, and secure provisioning of vehicles, digital assistants can support mobility end-to-end. The same technologies can be used in moving goods and retail delivery systems.

The pressure to become profitable will force changes and consolidation among the MaaS providers and will keep their focus on approaches to reducing costs such as through autonomous driving. Incumbent original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) are expanding their businesses to include elements of car-sharing to continue evolving their businesses as private car ownership is likely to decline over time.

Connecting vehicles to the cloud

We refer holistically to these various signals that can inform vehicle routing (traffic, weather, available modalities, municipal infrastructure, and more) as “navigation intelligence.” Taking advantage of this navigation intelligence will require connected vehicles to become more sophisticated than just logging telematics to the cloud.

The reporting of basic telematics (car-to-cloud) is barely table-stakes; over-the-air updates (OTA, or cloud-to-car) will become key to delivering a market-competitive vehicle, as will command-and-control (more cloud-to-car, via phone apps). Forward-thinking car manufacturers deserve a lot of credit here for showing what’s possible and for creating in consumers the expectation that the appearance of new features in the car after it is purchased isn’t just cool, but normal.

Future steps include the integration of in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) with voice assistants that blend the in- and out-of-vehicle experiences, updating AI models for in-market vehicles for automated driving levels one through five, and of course pre-processing the telemetry at the edge in order to better enable reinforcement learning in the cloud as well as just generally improving services.

Delivering value from the cloud to vehicles and phones

As vehicles become more richly connected and deliver experiences that overlap with what we’ve come to expect from our phones, an emerging question is, what is the right way to make these work together? Projecting to the IVI system of the vehicle is one approach, but most agree that vehicles should have a great experience without a phone present.

Separately, phones are a great proxy for “a vehicle” in some contexts, such as bicycle sharing, providing speed, location, and various other probe data, as well as providing connectivity (as well as subsidizing the associated costs) for low-powered electronics on the vehicle.

This is probably a good time to mention 5G. The opportunity 5G brings will have a ripple effect across industries. It will be a critical foundation for the continued rise of smart devices, machines, and things. They can speak, listen, see, feel, and act using sensitive sensor technology as well as data analytics and machine learning algorithms without requiring “always on” connectivity. This is what we call the intelligent edge. Our strategy is to enable 5G at the edge through cloud partnerships, with a focus on security and developer experience.

Optimizations through a system-of-systems approach

Connecting things to the cloud, getting data into the cloud, and then bringing the insights gained through cloud-enabled analytics back to the things is how optimizations in one area can be brought to bear in another area. This is the essence of digital transformation. Vehicles gathering high-resolution imagery for improving HD maps can also inform municipalities about maintenance issues. Accident information coupled with vehicle telemetry data can inform better PHYD (pay how you drive) insurance plans as well as the deployment of first responder infrastructure to reduce incident response time.

As the vehicle fleet electrifies, the demand for charging stations will grow. The way in-car routing works for an electric car is based only on knowledge of existing charging stations along the route—regardless of the current or predicted wait-times at those stations. But what if that route could also be informed by historical use patterns and live use data of individual charging stations in order to avoid arriving and having three cars ahead of you? Suddenly, your 20-minute charge time is actually a 60-minute stop, and an alternate route would have made more sense, even if, on paper, it’s more miles driven.

Realizing these kinds of scenarios means tying together knowledge about the electrical grid, traffic patterns, vehicle types, and incident data. The opportunities here for brokering the relationships among these systems are immense, as are the challenges to do so in a way that encourages the interconnection and sharing while maintaining privacy, compliance, and security.

Laws, policies, and ethics

The past several years of data breaches and elections are evidence of a continuously evolving nature of the security threats that we face. That kind of environment requires platforms that continuously invest in security as a fundamental cost of doing business.

Laws, regulatory compliance, and ethics must figure into the design and implementation of our technologies to as great a degree as goals like performance and scalability do. Smart city initiatives, where having visibility into the movement of people, goods, and vehicles is key to doing the kinds of optimizations that increase the quality of life in these cities, will confront these issues head-on.

Routing today is informed by traffic conditions but is still fairly “selfish:” routing for “me” rather than for “we.” Cities would like a hand in shaping traffic, especially if they can factor in deeper insights such as the types of vehicles on the road (sending freight one way versus passenger traffic another way), whether or not there is an upcoming sporting event or road closure, weather, and so on.

Doing this in a way that is cognizant of local infrastructure and the environment is what smart cities initiatives are all about.

For these reasons, we have joined the Open Mobility Foundation. We are also involved with Stanford’s Digital Cities Program, the Smart Transportation Council, the Alliance to Save Energy by the 50×50 Transportation Initiative, and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development.

With the Microsoft Connected Vehicle Platform (MCVP) and an ecosystem of partners across the industry, Microsoft offers a consistent horizontal platform on top of which customer-facing solutions can be built. MCVP helps mobility companies accelerate the delivery of digital services across vehicle provisioning, two-way network connectivity, and continuous over-the-air updates of containerized functionality. MCVP provides support for command-and-control, hot/warm/cold path for telematics, and extension hooks for customer/third-party differentiation. Being built on Azure, MCVP then includes the hyperscale, global availability, and regulatory compliance that comes as part of Azure. OEMs and fleet operators leverage MCVP as a way to “move up the stack” and focus on their customers rather than spend resources on non-differentiating infrastructure.

Innovation in the automotive industry

At Microsoft, and within the Azure IoT organization specifically, we have a front-row seat on the transformative work that is being done in many different industries, using sensors to gather data and develop insights that inform better decision-making. We are excited to see these industries on paths that are trending to converging, mutually beneficial paths. Our colleague Sanjay Ravi shares his thoughts from an automotive industry perspective in this great article.

Turning our attention to our customer and partner ecosystem, the traction we’ve gotten across the industry has been overwhelming:

The Volkswagen Automotive Cloud will be one of the largest dedicated clouds of its kind in the automotive industry and will provide all future digital services and mobility offerings across its entire fleet. More than 5 million new Volkswagen-specific brand vehicles are to be fully connected on Microsoft’s Azure cloud and edge platform each year. The Automotive Cloud subsequently will be rolled out on all Group brands and models.

Cerence is working with us to integrate Cerence Drive products with MCVP. This new integration is part of Cerence’s ongoing commitment to delivering a superior user experience in the car through interoperability across voice-powered platforms and operating systems. Automakers developing their connected vehicle solutions on MCVP can now benefit from Cerence’s industry-leading conversational AI, in turn delivering a seamless, connected, voice-powered experience to their drivers.

Ericsson, whose Connected Vehicle Cloud connects more than 4 million vehicles across 180 countries, is integrating their Connected Vehicle Cloud with Microsoft’s Connected Vehicle Platform to accelerate the delivery of safe, comfortable, and personalized connected driving experiences with our cloud, AI, and IoT technologies.

LG Electronics is working with Microsoft to build its automotive infotainment systems, building management systems and other business-to-business collaborations. LG will leverage Microsoft Azure cloud and AI services to accelerate the digital transformation of LG’s B2B business growth engines, as well as Automotive Intelligent Edge, the in-vehicle runtime environment provided as part of MCVP.

Global technology company ZF Friedrichshafen is transforming into a provider of software-driven mobility solutions, leveraging Azure cloud services and developer tools to promote faster development and validation of connected vehicle functions on a global scale.

Faurecia is collaborating with Microsoft to develop services that improve comfort, wellness, and infotainment as well as bring digital continuity from home or the office to the car. At CES, Faurecia demonstrated how its cockpit integration will enable Microsoft Teams video conferencing. Using Microsoft Connected Vehicle Platform, Faurecia also showcased its vision of playing games on the go, using Microsoft’s new Project xCloud streaming game preview.

Bell has revealed AerOS, a digital mobility platform that will give operators a 360° view into their aircraft fleet. By leveraging technologies like artificial intelligence and IoT, AerOS provides powerful capabilities like fleet master scheduling and real-time aircraft monitoring, enhancing Bell’s Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) experience. Bell chose Microsoft Azure as the technology platform to manage fleet information, observe aircraft health, and manage the throughput of goods, products, predictive data, and maintenance.

Luxoft is expanding its collaboration with Microsoft to accelerate the delivery of connected vehicle solutions and mobility experiences. By leveraging MCVP, Luxoft will enable and accelerate the delivery of vehicle-centric solutions and services that will allow automakers to deliver unique features such as advanced vehicle diagnostics, remote access and repair, and preventive maintenance. Collecting real usage data will also support vehicle engineering to improve manufacturing quality.

We are incredibly excited to be a part of the connected vehicle space. With MCVP, our ecosystem partners and our partnerships with leading automotive players, both vehicle OEMs and automotive technology suppliers, we believe we have a uniquely capable offering enabling at global scale the next wave of innovation in the automotive industry as well as related verticals such as smart cities, smart infrastructure, insurance, transportation, and beyond.

As we embark upon a new decade, the automotive industry is reaching the most transformative point in its long, pre-digital history. It is predicted that by 2030, there will be a $4 trillion opportunity focused on new mobility services, as the automotive and transportation sectors converge.

Nowhere was the breadth and scale of this opportunity more evident than at CES 2020, held earlier this year in Las Vegas. At this year’s show, two key themes really stood out for me in terms of the transformations that are happening around connected, autonomous, shared and electric (C.A.S.E.) scenarios, and the underlying technologies that are enabling them.

First, the C.A.S.E. technologies that were introduced during the past decade have advanced significantly. And second, over the next 10 years, we will see these capabilities merge.

The C.A.S.E. technologies that were introduced during the past decade have advanced significantly. At CES, we were proud to share in some important announcements with our customers and partners around these advancements, demonstrating how Microsoft technology is helping to accelerate new business models and consumer experiences.

Re-inventing the in-vehicle experience

When it comes to connected vehicles, capabilities such as in-car productivity and entertainment are critical for competitive differentiation. Faurecia, a global leader in automotive technology, is collaborating with Microsoft to develop services that improve comfort, wellness and infotainment, as well as bring digital continuity from the home or office to the car, through access to content on demand or through collaborative working platforms.

A cloud-connected cockpit gives automakers, mobility providers and consumers the ability to upgrade their traveling environment, for example, through enhancing sound, and personalizing entertainment options or in-cabin services. At CES, Faurecia demonstrated how its cockpit integration will enable Microsoft Teams videoconferencing. Using Microsoft Connected Vehicle Platform, Faurecia also showcased its vision of playing games on the go, using Microsoft’s new Project xCloud streaming game preview.

Cerence, a global leader in creating unique, moving experiences for the automotive world, is working with Microsoft to integrate Cerence Drive products with the Microsoft Connected Vehicle Platform (MCVP). This new integration is part of Cerence’s ongoing commitment to delivering a superior user experience in the car through interoperability across voice-powered platforms and operating systems. Automakers developing their connected vehicle solutions on MCVP can now benefit from Cerence’s industry-leading conversational artificial intelligence (AI), in turn delivering a seamless, connected, voice-powered experience to drivers and passengers using their technology.

Speeding up the drive to full autonomy

Mainstream autonomous mobility is coming. IHS Markit, a world leader in critical information, analytics and solutions, cites significant growth in the availability and standardization of advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) and automated driving, as people become more comfortable with these technologies.

Microsoft is collaborating with the industry to bring us closer to an autonomous future by accelerating autonomous driving development and testing with the Azure ecosystem. For example, Elektrobit, an award-winning global supplier of embedded and connected software products and services for the automotive industry, accelerates development of ADAS and AD systems with a new, cloud-based, end-to-end solution for software validation.

Available on Azure, the new EB Assist Test Lab provides distributed teams with a single solution to more easily manage petabytes of driving-scene data generated in real and simulated test drives during the validation and verification process, allowing those teams to collaborate and ultimately bring the latest features into production more quickly.

Pioneering the mobility experiences of the future 

The next decade will see the creation of standardized platforms for smart mobility services that are built to support commercial solutions, meet consumer demands at global scale and re-invent experiences. Bell’s digital mobility platform, AerOS, will give fleet operators a 360-degree view into their aircraft fleet. By leveraging technologies like AI and IoT, AerOS provides powerful capabilities like fleet master scheduling and real-time aircraft monitoring, enhancing Bell’s Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) experience. In building AerOS, Bell chose Microsoft’s Azure cloud as the foundation, and teamed up with Microsoft’s engineers to gain architectural insight, developer support and best practices.

Mobility services will also be a major catalyst for the development of advanced IoT capabilities that make it possible to securely transmit data in complex environments across edge devices such as vehicles, phones, traffic lights or charging stations, and the cloud. We are already seeing the converging of the automotive retail and energy industries, thanks to what is happening with smart charging. Now, the entire energy grid is coming together in a connected way to redefine how we power our cars.

FlashParking, a leader in parking technology, has unveiled their Mobility Hub Operating System, a platform built on Microsoft Azure that is powering the evolution of isolated parking assets into connected mobility hubs that are more efficient, intelligent and adaptable than the garages and surface lots of the past.

Merging advanced technologies to power the future of the automotive industry

The convergence of advanced technologies is playing a key role in enabling the automotive ecosystem and delivering smart mobility services. This is where Microsoft comes in. Along with our extensive global partner network, we support automotive and mobility companies in their evolution to becoming sustainable mobility service providers.

Global technology company ZF Friedrichshafen is transforming into a provider of software-driven mobility solutions, leveraging Azure cloud services and developer tools to promote faster development and validation of connected vehicle functions at a global scale.

LG Electronics is working with Microsoft to build its automotive infotainment systems, building management systems and other business-to-business collaborations. LG will leverage Microsoft Azure cloud and AI services to accelerate the digital transformation of LG’s B2B business growth engines.

Accelerating the connected vehicle opportunity

Many of the value-added services that were on display at CES from our customers and partners are powered by the Microsoft Connected Vehicle Platform (MCVP). It provides underlying capabilities that our partners and OEMs can use to quickly and cost-effectively create their own connected vehicle solutions. These include digital services ranging from assisted and autonomous driving to in-vehicle AI telemetry and advanced navigation.

For example, leveraging Azure Maps, Microsoft has built strong partnerships with TomTom, a leading independent location technology specialist, for traffic-based routing. In addition, we are working with TomTom and Moovit on developing a multi-modal trip planner, and with AccuWeather for weather reports and forecasts to increase awareness of weather events that will occur along a driver’s route.

A growing number of car makers and partners are taking advantage of MCVP, including Volkswagen and Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance. At CES, Kal Mos, alliance global VP of connected car service at Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi, explained the evolution of Nissan’s customer connected services and shared his views for the future.

The Volkswagen Automotive Cloud will be one of the largest dedicated clouds of its kind in the automotive industry and will provide all future digital services and mobility offerings across its entire fleet. More than 5 million new Volkswagen-specific brand vehicles are to be fully connected on Microsoft’s Azure cloud and edge platform each year. The Automotive Cloud subsequently will be rolled out on all Volkswagen Group brands and models.

Volkswagen intends to assemble more than 10,000 digital experts together in its new Car.Software organization, with a group-wide responsibility for software in the vehicle by 2025. The organization will develop cross-brand software in five clusters: Connected Car & Device Platform; Intelligent Body & Cockpit; Automated Driving; Vehicle Motion & Energy; and Digital Business & Mobility Services. The objective is to establish one uniform software architecture across the Volkswagen Group, and bring together parallel development paths in the brands. The clusters will cover the development work on one standard vehicle operating system, “vw.os,” for all Volkswagen Group vehicles and their connection to the Volkswagen Automotive Cloud.

Ericsson is integrating its Connected Vehicle Cloud, which connects more than 4 million vehicles across 180 countries, with Microsoft’s Connected Vehicle Platform to accelerate the delivery of safe, comfortable and personalized connected driving experiences. The integrated solution allows automakers to more quickly and easily deploy and scale global vehicle services such as fleet management, over-the-air software upgrades and connected safety services, while reducing costs.

Luxoft, a digital strategy and software engineering firm, is expanding its collaboration with Microsoft to accelerate the delivery of connected vehicle solutions and mobility experiences. By leveraging MCVP, Luxoft will enable and accelerate the delivery of vehicle-centric solutions and services that will allow automakers to deliver unique features such as advanced vehicle diagnostics, remote access and repair, and preventive maintenance. Collecting real usage data will also support vehicle engineering to improve manufacturing quality.

As we embark upon a new decade, the automotive industry is reaching the most transformative point in its long, pre-digital history. It is predicted that by 2030, there will be a $4 trillion opportunity focused on new mobility services, as the automotive and transportation sectors converge.

Nowhere was the breadth and scale of this opportunity more evident than at CES 2020, held earlier this year in Las Vegas. At this year’s show, two key themes really stood out for me in terms of the transformations that are happening around connected, autonomous, shared and electric (C.A.S.E.) scenarios, and the underlying technologies that are enabling them.

First, the C.A.S.E. technologies that were introduced during the past decade have advanced significantly. And second, over the next 10 years, we will see these capabilities merge.

The C.A.S.E. technologies that were introduced during the past decade have advanced significantly. At CES, we were proud to share in some important announcements with our customers and partners around these advancements, demonstrating how Microsoft technology is helping to accelerate new business models and consumer experiences.

Re-inventing the in-vehicle experience

When it comes to connected vehicles, capabilities such as in-car productivity and entertainment are critical for competitive differentiation. Faurecia, a global leader in automotive technology, is collaborating with Microsoft to develop services that improve comfort, wellness and infotainment, as well as bring digital continuity from the home or office to the car, through access to content on demand or through collaborative working platforms.

A cloud-connected cockpit gives automakers, mobility providers and consumers the ability to upgrade their traveling environment, for example, through enhancing sound, and personalizing entertainment options or in-cabin services. At CES, Faurecia demonstrated how its cockpit integration will enable Microsoft Teams videoconferencing. Using Microsoft Connected Vehicle Platform, Faurecia also showcased its vision of playing games on the go, using Microsoft’s new Project xCloud streaming game preview.

Cerence, a global leader in creating unique, moving experiences for the automotive world, is working with Microsoft to integrate Cerence Drive products with the Microsoft Connected Vehicle Platform (MCVP). This new integration is part of Cerence’s ongoing commitment to delivering a superior user experience in the car through interoperability across voice-powered platforms and operating systems. Automakers developing their connected vehicle solutions on MCVP can now benefit from Cerence’s industry-leading conversational artificial intelligence (AI), in turn delivering a seamless, connected, voice-powered experience to drivers and passengers using their technology.

Speeding up the drive to full autonomy

Mainstream autonomous mobility is coming. IHS Markit, a world leader in critical information, analytics and solutions, cites significant growth in the availability and standardization of advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) and automated driving, as people become more comfortable with these technologies.

Microsoft is collaborating with the industry to bring us closer to an autonomous future by accelerating autonomous driving development and testing with the Azure ecosystem. For example, Elektrobit, an award-winning global supplier of embedded and connected software products and services for the automotive industry, accelerates development of ADAS and AD systems with a new, cloud-based, end-to-end solution for software validation.

Available on Azure, the new EB Assist Test Lab provides distributed teams with a single solution to more easily manage petabytes of driving-scene data generated in real and simulated test drives during the validation and verification process, allowing those teams to collaborate and ultimately bring the latest features into production more quickly.

Pioneering the mobility experiences of the future 

The next decade will see the creation of standardized platforms for smart mobility services that are built to support commercial solutions, meet consumer demands at global scale and re-invent experiences. Bell’s digital mobility platform, AerOS, will give fleet operators a 360-degree view into their aircraft fleet. By leveraging technologies like AI and IoT, AerOS provides powerful capabilities like fleet master scheduling and real-time aircraft monitoring, enhancing Bell’s Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) experience. In building AerOS, Bell chose Microsoft’s Azure cloud as the foundation, and teamed up with Microsoft’s engineers to gain architectural insight, developer support and best practices.

Mobility services will also be a major catalyst for the development of advanced IoT capabilities that make it possible to securely transmit data in complex environments across edge devices such as vehicles, phones, traffic lights or charging stations, and the cloud. We are already seeing the converging of the automotive retail and energy industries, thanks to what is happening with smart charging. Now, the entire energy grid is coming together in a connected way to redefine how we power our cars.

FlashParking, a leader in parking technology, has unveiled their Mobility Hub Operating System, a platform built on Microsoft Azure that is powering the evolution of isolated parking assets into connected mobility hubs that are more efficient, intelligent and adaptable than the garages and surface lots of the past.

Merging advanced technologies to power the future of the automotive industry

The convergence of advanced technologies is playing a key role in enabling the automotive ecosystem and delivering smart mobility services. This is where Microsoft comes in. Along with our extensive global partner network, we support automotive and mobility companies in their evolution to becoming sustainable mobility service providers.

Global technology company ZF Friedrichshafen is transforming into a provider of software-driven mobility solutions, leveraging Azure cloud services and developer tools to promote faster development and validation of connected vehicle functions at a global scale.

LG Electronics is working with Microsoft to build its automotive infotainment systems, building management systems and other business-to-business collaborations. LG will leverage Microsoft Azure cloud and AI services to accelerate the digital transformation of LG’s B2B business growth engines.

Accelerating the connected vehicle opportunity

Many of the value-added services that were on display at CES from our customers and partners are powered by the Microsoft Connected Vehicle Platform (MCVP). It provides underlying capabilities that our partners and OEMs can use to quickly and cost-effectively create their own connected vehicle solutions. These include digital services ranging from assisted and autonomous driving to in-vehicle AI telemetry and advanced navigation.

For example, Microsoft has built strong partnerships with TomTom, a leading independent location technology specialist, for traffic-based routing. In addition, we are working with TomTom and Moovit on developing a multi-modal trip planner, and with AccuWeather for weather reports and forecasts to increase awareness of weather events that will occur along a driver’s route.

A growing number of car makers and partners are taking advantage of MCVP, including Volkswagen and Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance. At CES, Kal Mos, alliance global VP of connected car service at Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi, explained the evolution of Nissan’s customer connected services and shared his views for the future.

The Volkswagen Automotive Cloud will be one of the largest dedicated clouds of its kind in the automotive industry and will provide all future digital services and mobility offerings across its entire fleet. More than 5 million new Volkswagen-specific brand vehicles are to be fully connected on Microsoft’s Azure cloud and edge platform each year. The Automotive Cloud subsequently will be rolled out on all Volkswagen Group brands and models.

Volkswagen intends to assemble more than 10,000 digital experts together in its new Car.Software organization, with a group-wide responsibility for software in the vehicle by 2025. The organization will develop cross-brand software in five clusters: Connected Car & Device Platform; Intelligent Body & Cockpit; Automated Driving; Vehicle Motion & Energy; and Digital Business & Mobility Services. The objective is to establish one uniform software architecture across the Volkswagen Group, and bring together parallel development paths in the brands. The clusters will cover the development work on one standard vehicle operating system, “vw.os,” for all Volkswagen Group vehicles and their connection to the Volkswagen Automotive Cloud.

Ericsson is integrating its Connected Vehicle Cloud, which connects more than 4 million vehicles across 180 countries, with Microsoft’s Connected Vehicle Platform to accelerate the delivery of safe, comfortable and personalized connected driving experiences. The integrated solution allows automakers to more quickly and easily deploy and scale global vehicle services such as fleet management, over-the-air software upgrades and connected safety services, while reducing costs.

Luxoft, a digital strategy and software engineering firm, is expanding its collaboration with Microsoft to accelerate the delivery of connected vehicle solutions and mobility experiences. By leveraging MCVP, Luxoft will enable and accelerate the delivery of vehicle-centric solutions and services that will allow automakers to deliver unique features such as advanced vehicle diagnostics, remote access and repair, and preventive maintenance. Collecting real usage data will also support vehicle engineering to improve manufacturing quality.

“In the future, software will have one of the largest impacts on automotive system development and will be one of the key differentiating factors when it comes to realizing higher levels of automated driving functions. We want to help drive this trend forward. The collaboration with Microsoft will enable us to accelerate software integration and delivery significantly. This is important for our customers who appreciate agile collaboration and need short delivery cadences for software updates. Moreover, software will need to be developed when hardware is not yet available,” explained Dr Dirk Walliser, responsible for corporate research and development at ZF. ZF will then combine its enormous know-how as a system developer for the automotive industry with the added advantage of significantly higher speeds for software development.

“Digital capabilities will be key for automotive companies to grow and differentiate from their competition. DevOps empowers development and operations teams to optimize cross-team collaboration across automation, testing, monitoring and continuous delivery using agile methods. Microsoft is providing DevOps capabilities and sharing our experiences with ZF to help them become a software-driven mobility services provider”, said Sanjay Ravi, General Manager, Automotive Industry at Microsoft.

“cubiX”: Chassis of the Future from Code

At CES 2020, ZF will showcase its vision of software development with “cubiX”: It is a software component that gathers sensor information from the entire vehicle and prepares it for an optimized control of active systems in the chassis, steering, brakes and propulsion. Following a vendor-agnostic approach, “cubiX” will support components from ZF as well as third-party components. “cubiX creates networked chassis functions thanks to software: By connecting multiple vehicle systems such as electric power steering, active rear axle steering, the sMOTION active damping system, driveline control and integrated brake control, ‘cubiX’ can optimize the behavior of the car from one central source. This enables a new level of vehicle control and thus can increase safety – for example in unfavorable road conditions or in emergency situations,” said Dr Dirk Walliser. ZF plans to start projects with first customers in 2020 and will offer “cubiX” from 2023 either as part of an overall system or as an individual software component.

ZF at CES 2020

In addition, ZF will present its comprehensive systems for automated and autonomous driving at CES. They comprise sensors, computing power, software and actuators.

For passenger cars, Level 2+ systems pave the way for a safer and more comfortable means of private transportation. New mobility solutions like robo-taxis are designed to safely operate with ZF’s Level 4/5 systems. Additionally, ZF’s innovative integrated safety systems will be on display, like the Safe Human Interaction Cockpit. Innovative software utilizing artificial intelligence to provide new features and further-developed mobility offerings will also be highlighted.

Join ZF in Las Vegas

Press Conference: Monday, January 6, 2020, 8 AM (PST): Mandalay Bay, Lagoon E & F. Alternatively, you can watch the livestream at www.zf.com/CESlive

ZF Booth: LVCC, North Hall, booth 3931

Starting next week at IAA – New Mobility World, Microsoft will join 1000+ exhibitors and 250,000 visitors from approximately 39 countries to exhibit and explore immersive technologies, visionary concepts like electromobility, and many industry disruptors in Frankfurt. This year at IAA – New Mobility World asks the questions: “How are society, business, indeed our whole way of life changing and how does this affect our mobility? What can new technologies offer us?”

Shaping the transformation of the automotive industry

Today, Microsoft partners with automotive companies to revolutionize mobility with digital technology—building differentiated experiences, accelerating automotive innovation, monetizing data and services, and redefining transportation for a cleaner, safer world. Learn more about Microsoft’s perspective on navigating the future of autonomous vehicles.

With Microsoft Business Applications, our automotive partners, suppliers, and retailers can develop new customer insights and create omnichannel customer experiences with the Microsoft Automotive Accelerator.

Creating omnichannel customer experiences

Microsoft Industry Accelerators are a packaged and prepopulated common data model (CDM) using industry standards, built on Microsoft 365, Azure, and Dynamics 365. Industry accelerators enable customers and ISVs to build industry solutions on Microsoft technology by enabling specific industry business processes or scenarios for partners to develop industry solutions.

The Microsoft Automotive Accelerator allows users to schedule appointments and automotive services, facilitated through proactive communications. Microsoft partners gain access to a wide range of industry-standard entities and data relationships, allowing for rapid development of new automotive solutions. Working with our partners and industry leaders, the accelerator was developed to help auto makers, dealerships, and service providers quickly add more value for their customers.

For auto makers, the accelerator offers a vehicle and equipment management focus which allows device details and specifications within our data model to allow for the management and tracking of vehicles and devices. For dealerships and service providers, the accelerator includes a service and post-sales focus helping create connected customer experiences with a holistic view of customers, from service appointments to contracts and warranties.

Building new solutions with partners

This year at IAA – New Mobility World, Annata will showcase how their Annata 365 solutions, built on Microsoft technology with the Automotive Accelerator, help automotive and equipment businesses meet business challenges while taking advantages of new opportunities in the market.

The new Annata 365 for Sales solution adds industry-specific functionality to Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales, and is targeted specifically at driving a customer-centric approach to marketing and sales processes within the ever-evolving automotive industry. Annata 365 and the Microsoft Power Platform provide built-in analytics and intelligence, task-based apps, and omnichannel capabilities to drive digital transformation and innovation in any automotive organization.

We will also highlight our partnership with Adobe at IAA. Adobe and Microsoft’s strategic partnership and integrations allow an end-to-end customer experience management solution for experience creation, marketing, advertising, analytics, and commerce. This allows companies to deliver consistent and compelling experiences at each touch point with a customer, accelerating business growth throughout the customer journey.

Get the full story at IAA

These are just a few of the ways we’re partnering with organizations like Annata and Adobe to transform the automotive industry with Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform. If you are attending IAA, visit our booth at the Frankfurt Exhibition Hall 5, Stand C21, to experience our full suite of technologies and chat with customers and partners.

For more information about our location and sessions at this event, please see our event site.