The Flagship Experience: How AI and Software-Defined Vehicles Will Revolutionize the Automotive Customer Experience

2025 Axiom Business Book Award Winner — Industry Insights (Silver)

2024 Goody Business Book Awards finalist in Technology – Gamechanger and Technology – General

Megatrends such as climate change, urbanization, new work practices, and aging populations are starting to impact how we move and how we transport goods, as well as the decisions we make about consumer transportation and logistics. The Flagship Experience discusses how Software-Defined Vehicles and AI will enable automakers, transportation providers, and transportation planners to reimagine the mobility customer experience, and presents a framework for implementing it.

Software-Defined Vehicles will center the customer experience around the customer, not the vehicle. Combining AI with vehicles’ big data generation, configurability, and updatability provides automakers with recurring customer-monetization opportunities. It impacts how automakers design, make, sell, and service vehicles; how transportation and logistics providers maximize their vehicles’ utilization and improve the return on their investment; and how customers (both consumers and businesses) interact with the vehicle, the automaker, and numerous service providers. To succeed in making this shift, organizations will need to undertake important transformations. The Flagship Experience analyzes the approaches already taken and outlines additional ones that will be necessary.

Evangelos Simoudis is a recognized expert on AI, big data, and new mobility. He has been working in Silicon Valley for thirty years as a startup founder and CEO, corporate executive, venture investor, and senior advisor to global corporations and governments. His firm, Synapse Partners, is investing in AI startups and advising senior management teams of large organizations on AI and new business models. In addition to being presented in several papers, the results of his work on new mobility have been published in two books: The Big Data Opportunity in Our Driverless Future and Transportation Transformation. He is a member of the California Institute of Technology’s (Caltech) Advisory Board, the Advisory Board of Brandeis International Business School, the Advisory Board of C2SMART (a US Department of Transportation Center of Excellence), and the Advisory Board of Securing America’s Future Energy. He earned a PhD in computer science from Brandeis University in machine learning and large databases and a BS in electrical engineering from Caltech.