How did VW reimagine their business through human and AI collaboration?

Take a new approach that uses artificial intelligence to bring out the full power of people and enhance job creation. Move beyond deploying AI for automation alone and push into the new frontier of co-creation between people and machines.

Don’t just automate, collaborate The Volkswagen Microbus is the definition of an iconic design. Just saying “VW Bus” conjures a mental image of the 1960s mainstay; even people who haven’t seen one in person can immediately picture it. So, when VW decided to reconceptualise the 1962 Microbus, the company wanted to stay true to the vehicle’s historic design—but update it to be lighter and greener in line with today’s standards. To solve this problem, VW partnered with engineering software services leader Autodesk to experiment with generative design tools and create new jobs.

Generative design enables iterative collaboration between human engineers and artificial intelligence: humans provide design goals and constraints to an AI system, which outputs a wide range of feasible—though sometimes unexpected—solutions. From there, the parties continue to iterate, with the machine generating ideas and human co-workers curating and refining them.

The VW and Autodesk collaboration ultimately created parts for the Microbus that were lighter and stronger than any prior designs. The AI, for example, inspired a tree-like design concept for the wheels that made them 18 percent lighter than a standard set. The generative approach also allowed VW to reduce the time spent getting from development to manufacturing—a 1.5-year cycle was reduced to just a few months. Those metrics were big wins. But what was more important was how VW got there. The designers credited generative design and their AI collaboration with creating structures they could never have created on their own.

This and similar experiments from across industries reveal a stunning reality: businesses today are realizing only a fraction of their AI potential. Leaders got to a point of advantage by plugging AI and other tech tools into existing workflows, focusing on automation and execution. But simply using AI to make their organizations run faster and cheaper limits its impact. Now, leaders are leveraging the potential of AI systems to transform not just how businesses do work, but also what they actually do. AI is becoming an agent of change across the organization. To capitalize on this, businesses need to reimagine AI’s role in the organization. Artificial intelligence offers one of the key advantages that have let startups disrupt decades-old incumbents: the technology doesn’t approach a problem based on years of experience or inherent human biases. It hasn’t yet learned what not to try. But AI can’t reinvent the business on its own and humans will still require jobs. To tap into the unique strengths of the technology, businesses will rely on people’s ability to steward, direct and refine AI. Enterprises will need to engineer the opportunity for human employees  to couple their unique talents and knowledge with the limitless capacity of machines to explore new possibilities. Those that do so successfully will build the next generation of intelligent businesses—where humans and AI systems work together to reimagine what’s possible.

This trend isn’t limited to generative design. Leaders are beginning to recognize the tremendous potential of enabling humans and machines to inspire one another and work together. Take Open AI’s MuseNet, an AI that collaborates with humans to compose music, without people needing expertise in composition or technology. A human provides a starting sample, a target style and instrument preferences. MuseNet uses what it’s learned from hundreds of thousands of musical files to make suggestions about the next segment of a composition. The process repeats until a novel piece of music is created, the result of a true collaboration and division of labour between human and machine.

73% of organizations report piloting or adopting AI in one or more business units.

What are you doing to promote the collaboration between humans and AI?