"The car becomes a personality" — BMW top executive Laurent-Winter on the future of mobility Céline Laurent-Winter is Vice President Connected Vehicle Platforms at the BMW Group, where she has been with the company for 21 years. The native Frenchwoman studied mechanical engineering, earned a PhD in computer science, and was responsible, among other things, for topics such as vehicle dynamics and the Connected Car. For three years she has been working on connecting vehicles with the rest of the world. Why BMW develops much in-house, how the platforms for it must be designed, what role the cloud plays, how AI optimizes all of this – and what customers get from it – she explains in the interview. Where do you see the biggest advances from the use of AI? Laurent-Winter: AI supports us both in the product and in development and opens up completely new possibilities in terms of functionality. In the vehicle, it is mainly about being able to use natural language. In the past you had to speak clear commands for every function. This works today thanks to large language models, but also to small language models, much more intuitively. In addition, functions that were isolated before – for example navigation – can be linked together and connected into an integrated overall experience. That significantly enhances the user experience. One could perhaps summarize it like this: AI stands for an integrated overall experience. On the development side, AI saves us an enormous amount of time. Of course we still need developers, but many activities such as reviews, documentation or build processes can be automated. There is still the “Human in the Loop,” but with AI all of this becomes much faster. The same holds for our cloud platforms: you have to imagine them as a gigantic ecosystem