The final vision of an autonomous factory Physical AI has the potential to transform automotive manufacturing depending on globally recognised data standards and trust in the tools being developed with them, according to speakers from Hyundai, Lucid, Schaeffler and Accenture at this year’s Nvidia GTC conference Digital platforms are enabling OEMs to visualise production processes end-to-end before executing them on the shopfloor. The challenge now is to get the workforce of new talent up to scale and coherent with the latest technology and the speed of its development. The deployment of more intelligent automation is being coordinated by [AI] agents and that is what will ultimately be the final vision of an autonomous factory At this year’s Nvidia GTC global AI conference, speakers from Hyundai, Lucid, Schaeffler and Accenture looked at how the automotive industry is being transformed by AI and how a digital twin of the supply chain is critical to optimising manufacturing decisions. The journey from generative AI for design to agentic AI for orchestrating production in complex environments is now entering the phase of physical AI, driving fundamental change in the real world by simulating manufacturing processes and then deploying autonomous robotics to carry them out. “The deployment of more intelligent automation is being coordinated by [AI] agents and that is what will ultimately be the final vision of an autonomous factory,” said Alpesh Patel, senior vice-president of the Software-Defined Factory Transformation Center at Hyundai Motor Group. Software-defined factory Hyundai Motor Group is currently building an AI factory with Nvidia in Korea to accelerate model training, validation and deployment for in-vehicle AI, autonomous driving, smart factories and robotics. Nvidia provides hardware and software for AI and will Hyundai will be deploying Nvidia’s Blackwell AI infrastructure across manufacturing and robotics, as well as autonomous driving. The two companies