Safety has always been easy to understand in a Volvo, making its case in plain sight with steel and seatbelts. Safety in AI calls for a more nuanced understanding, because the guardrails are invisible and the consequences of poor decisions are not always obvious.
It was fascinating, then, to see the safety imperatives of the two worlds come together this week as the unstated theme of a key session at NTT Data’s Horizons Innovation Summit in Milan.
While NTT is a Japanese organisation, the NTT Data division has its roots in South Africa, born as Dimension Data in Joburg. Today it is one of the top IT services groups in the world and one of the few providers of a “full stack” of enterprise-scale AI integration.
Bill Wilson, global head of AI for government at NTT Data, was joined on stage at the innovation summit by Ian Thomas, Volvo Cars’ global head of strategic initiatives for data, AI and intelligent automation, to explore the role of trust at the intersection of the physical and digital worlds.
Thomas did not have to invoke the Volvo legacy, as Wilson had his own very personal history: “Growing up, our family car was a Volvo T40,” he said. “That Volvo went on to save my father’s life.”
Thomas responded that it was the kind of story he heard frequently: “There’s an amazing emotional connection between Volvo Cars, the brand and safety. But Volvo has a very strong affiliation with performance as well. That performance shows up differently today. It shows up still under the hood, of course, but it shows up also in the software, the data and the intelligence in the vehicle itself.”
This meant, he said, that Volvo was not treating AI as a separate layer pasted onto the business. It was part of the same design philosophy that made safety central to the brand in the first place.
“It’s safer, it’s smarter and it’s more personalised than ever before. It’s safer because we’re using AI technology to allow the car to understand its environment. This gives it context.
This also defines where the risk lies. Once a machine is reading its surroundings, forming a judgement and acting on it, safety becomes a software issue as much as a physical one.
“It’s smarter because we’re then using AI technology to take decisions based on that context, and that decision will sometimes support the driver and sometimes intercede in a critical safety situation. And it’s more personalised through the intelligent assistants that are supporting the driver in the car but also as part of a broader connected car experience.”
This also defines where the risk lies. Once a machine is reading its surroundings, forming a judgement and acting on it, safety becomes a software issue as much as a physical one.
“Never before have we been able to process so much data, identify patterns, discern meaning from context, inform decisions and even take actions in workflows. What that really means to me is that we are now compressing the time from an idea to a real-world impact.
“It also raises a really important question, and that is, how do we balance the speed of innovation that’s now available to us with the responsibility and the trust that people place in our brand?”
That question lies at the heart of every corporate AI strategy, even if executives do not realise it. In Volvo’s case, it carries extra force because the brand has spent decades persuading people to trust its judgment in life-and-death situations.
Thomas was refreshingly frank about where value is coming from. “We’re yet to discover a single application of AI that delivers huge value. Rather, we are seeing the compound effect, where across a process or across a value stream lots of improvements through AI add up to give us true value.”
No hunt for a killer app, then? Well, maybe.
“Our software engineering teams are leveraging AI-assisted tools to write code, perform testing and improve documentation. Our hardware engineering teams are looking at how best to optimise designs by looking at various different features, such as materials, weight, cost, sustainability and, of course, mechanical engineering performance. We build guardrails that allow us to move at pace.
“Safety of people in the physical world has always been something Volvo has designed its products around. As we now design the agentic systems of the future, we’re trying to take that thinking around safety and trust into the digital world and the AI age.”
• Goldstuck is CEO of World Wide Worx, editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za, and author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to AI — The African Edge.
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