AWS, BMW Team On Cloud Solutions For Automotive Lifecycle

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is working with BMW Group on a “comprehensive strategic collaboration” for cloud-enabled services to help with everything from vehicle design to selling to customers, a press release says.

By collaborating with Amazon, BMW officials will be able to work with Amazon SageMaker, which utilizes machine learning, and other Amazon services, to help boost engineering, manufacturing, sales and vehicle performance data. Third-party partners, including car dealerships and suppliers and tech companies, will be able to contribute data and also benefit from machine learning.

The release elaborates with an example: BMW will be able to use machine learning to forecast demand for a range of vehicle models and individual equipment globally, and optimize sales, production and purchasing for better customer service.

In addition, the companies will work together on new products to help with transparency in the supply chain and to access better operational performance. For instance, the BMW Group’s PartChain Platform uses AWS services such as Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) in order to boost traceability for automotive parts with blockchain, letting BMW link specific parts for defect investigations and make sure materials are coming from responsible sources.

BMW will also be working with Amazon to help identify challenges in business, look at emerging technology and work on new cloud-enabled services, including a new natural language processing solution which will be used optimally to extract data from things like factory reports or social media to help the company get insights on customer service, marketing and compliance, among other related functions.

Earlier this year, BMW announced a plan to let drivers subscribe to luxury features on-demand, including virtual reality features and access to software to update a vehicle’s infotainment system and most of the codes making up modern vehicles. Some of the deluxe features include heated seats and advanced driver assistance systems.