At Honda Motor Company, technological change has transformed the business, and generative AI has become an important engine for innovation. The company's digitalization journey is not just a technological innovation, but also a cultural and strategic shift.
Honda Motor Company's digital transformation may not look as dramatic as its all-out shift to battery electric vehicles, but it provides the company's more than 30,000 employees with the power engine to drive innovation at automakers.
American Honda Motor Company is the United States subsidiary of Japanese automaker Honda, headquartered in Torrance, California. The company introduced its first hybrid electric vehicle in 1996 and plans to start production of its first all-electric zero-emission vehicle, the Honda Prologue and Acura ZDX SUVs, jointly developed with General Motors, this spring. Another of the company's pioneering efforts is the joint venture production center in Brownstown, Michigan, to co-develop CR-V fuel cell electric vehicle technology with General Motors.
Completing such a transformative electric vehicle and hydrogen fuel cell project against a backdrop of uncertainty as to which technology will become the industry standard reflects a challenge that Bob Brizendine, vice president of IT at Honda Motor Company, has faced during his 36 years at the company: a path that is constantly changing, winding, and never stopping.
The biggest challenge we face is keeping up with the pace of change"Brizendine said"We have to constantly reshuffle the cards, and the IT organization needs to be at least one step ahead of the company's growth. "
The development of advanced automation and robotics across the company's 12 manufacturing facilities in North America relies on significant advances in digital technology.
While Honda Motor Company's North American subsidiary migrated less than 20% of its internal workloads to the public cloud, Honda Motor Company's strong adoption of its SaaS platforms, ServiceNow and Salesforce, as well as a robust AI strategy, demonstrate the agility and flexibility of Brizendine and its IT organization to accelerate innovation.
When it comes to the future, Bob Brizendine arguesGenerative AI is a key component in ensuring that the Japanese automaker's North American subsidiary is precisely tuned on the road ahead.
Honda's extensive experience in machine learning puts it on track to take full advantage of the next wave: generative AI.
The rise of generative AI in the last year has put tremendous pressure on CIOs across industries to reach their full potential. For the automotive industry, Craig Powers, research director of global digital business strategy at IDC, said generative AI presents an opportunity for automakers to enable their automotive designers and developers to innovate at a higher level.
"The automotive industry has not traditionally been one of the leading industries when it comes to digital transformation, but the application of automation and artificial intelligence to optimize the ** chain and production processes is in the spotlight," Powers noted. Leveraging generative AI to enhance product development could be a big driver for automakers. The first companies to take this step are likely to benefit from faster and broader innovation. ”
With this in mind, Brizendine has developed a five-pronged generative AI strategy that looks at internal uses to improve employee productivity and efficiency:
The first is to fully control the enterprise use rights of generative AI. companyIT professionals and knowledge workers have full enterprise control over the use of generative AIrightThe result is a security strategy that can respond to any situation, is the American Honda generative typeaiThe heart of the strategy
The second is to effectively guide the application of generative AI in specific fields. This includes the effective onboarding of generative AI applications in specific domains, such as development, legal, and customer engagement, to meet more complex needs.
The third is to establish a dedicated environment to meet specific uses. For specific uses that require the use of specific Honda content or require additional security or data segmentation to improve efficiency, American Honda Motor Company has established a dedicated environment in-house, which accounts for approximately 20% of its usage.
Fourth, using generative AI to improve employee productivity and efficiency: Honda plans to roll out Microsoft's ChatGPT Enterprise (Copilot) for Office 365 employees who use Outlook or PowerPoint internally, and pilot GitHub's AI model to improve the efficiency of application development, application maintenance, and IT service processes.
In response to the hotly debated issue of replacing employees with generative AI applications, Brizendine said that Honda of the United States is not considering this. "We embrace the concept of human-computer interaction," he said. The real purpose of our AI design efforts is to enhance human creativity and productivity. He noted that Honda's pilot tests have shown significant productivity gains in documentation and data summarization, as well as faster output of data insights.
Fifth, we work with dealer networks, partner networks, and SaaS external service providers. Honda is clarifying how it will work with external partners on generative AI applications. For example, Honda's AI development team will work closely with ServiceNow, which is also rolling out generative AI to create the most efficient applications for Honda. The company also collaborates with other service providers and vendors to design and develop the most efficient applications for Honda's U.S. business.
Brizendine noted that Honda's overall AI strategy is tightly integrated with its data and analytics systems. These systems are embedded and run on a complex infrastructure, including on-premises hosting for specific workloads, SaaS applications, and the use of AWS and Microsoft Azure.
According to Brizendine, one of the keys to a successful AI strategy lies in the quality and purification of the structured and unstructured parts of the data.
He added that training employees is another major determinant of the success of Honda's generative AI program.
To that end, American Honda has launched a multi-year training and development program to elevate the digital capabilities of its entire workforce, from top management to developers and knowledge workers.
"Senior executives need to understand the capabilities of AI and how it can be applied to the operational and potentially strategic aspects of our work," Brizendine said. We then carefully design training to ensure that digital personnel in each business unit have everything they need. ”
There are a number of initiatives underway to digitize the business, including IT service management, and even a foray into the insurance industry to generate ongoing revenue, Brizendine said.
But there is no doubt that this business transformation is all due to the company's technological change. "There's a digital nexus that connects all of these transformations together," said Honda's head of IT. "Our innovation in technology is first and foremost what makes business innovation. ”
With the continuous evolution of technology, Toyota's control and application of generative AI will surely lead its future development direction. In this way, American Honda will also be more comfortable on the ever-changing path.