AI use cases in the automobile industry – real or hype?

Every day, new technology and AI products hit the market. And the hype just keeps growing, along with the skyrocketing costs for the hardware needed to run them.

The main question we have to ask ourselves is how much we have actually been able to use this AI wave to make processes faster and cheaper. In this blog article, I want to talk about whether this AI hype translates to real industry, specifically focusing on the automobile sector, where I have personal work experience.

As you probably know, almost every big company in Germany works with Microsoft Office. Practically all job postings list Microsoft 365 skills as a requirement. And sadly, there are also no alternatives to that. Why am I bringing this up? Because in February 2023, Microsoft introduced its AI, Copilot.

At first, it seemed like just another AI alongside Gemini or ChatGPT. But the strategic difference was that it belonged to Microsoft, and by May 2023, you could access Copilot across all Microsoft 365 applications. This was the start of a data revolution, particularly in Germany. Why? Because Microsoft essentially holds a monopoly here.

Every email goes through Outlook, and every file is uploaded to SharePoint. Every presentation is generated in PowerPoint, and every text and table is worked on in either Word or Excel. So basically, these platforms hold the biggest data files in the corporate world. 

Then, about six months later in November 2023, Microsoft released the Enterprise Copilot Premium version. This version somehow changed everything. It meant that if a company bought the premium license, the AI suddenly had access to all internal company data. Every email, Word document, Excel spreadsheet, and PowerPoint presentation was now accessible to Copilot. So, if a company decides to train Copilot, they can use it to generate PowerPoint presentations or Excel tables based on prompts.

Companies HAVE to do this so they can stay competitive in the Chinese market. I mean, they have already started late to adapt, and I kind of understand why this happens in Germany: bureaucracy and corporate resistance to learning and adapting to this new reality.

But now, we are entering a whole new phase. In the automobile industry, the fierce competition with China is the main issue. For a junior employee or a recent graduate, this means that for anything related to IT or computers, you now need to have a basic understanding of "vibe coding." You need to be able to build small tools and automate processes to make things run faster.

One of the most common issues in ALL of the company sectors in automobile industry related to this, is transferring data locally from computers to SharePoint. In large car manufacturing companies, moving massive amounts of data is usually outsourced to external companies at a high cost.

Most of these data are either irrelevent, or too old to use. So you have to be careful, uploading them on Sharepoint, because Copilot would be trained on them later, and you are going to have shity automated files and presentation and that you want to avoid.

That aside, what I want you to know is, with a little bit of programming, vibe coding, and some dedicated time, this can easily be done internally. This simple example is a struggle across all departments, from production and assembly to sales.

Identifying these problems usually starts at the lowest levels of the company. Connecting the dots between different departments—from parts manufacturing to the parts manager, and then reporting to the project manager—requires someone who can explain technical issues in simple terms.

This is exactly where a junior employee can step up and make a difference. Because juniors are generally more flexible and open-minded, they can easily poke around different departments, understand how the systems work, and then either build pilot projects and prototypes themselves or pass that valuable data on to the responsible departments.

In the end, this kind of proactive problem-solving and data collection is incredibly valuable to the company, and it is exactly what will make you stand out. So, this is the current market situation: companies are either hiring really knowledgeable experts, or they are hiring highly energetic, flexible juniors who can pivot with changes and flow with the market. It is your choice how you want to pursue and enter this market.

Arya