TomTom‘s Head of AI Ferenc Szeli has explained how the company uses the technology, what makes it so useful and how its application ultimately leads to better products, an improved experience and more value for customers in a fascinating video that you can watch HERE.
In the video Szeli says that AI is not new and that it’s been with the industry for 20 plus years but that it’s very nice to see how the two entities (TomTom and AI) have grown together.
“AI is not a buzzword. It is here to stay. And the right question is not necessarily, how can we replace people, but rather, how can we coexist?”
Creating a map is a ‘humongous’ challenge, he says, but that “AI has been with Tom Tom for as long as we can remember, and we went from enriching our map content into capturing images and translating it to map features automating a lot of our processes.
“What is the next step in the evolution is with the introduction of LLMs [large language models] and generative AI capabilities, and most specifically with Agent capabilities that now we unlock the next premium in terms of customer experience. Think about the map that is not only living, but it is accurate and it is able to scale when it comes to harnessing AI and agency capabilities.
“What makes me very optimistic is that we are able to then serve a wider market when we zoom in, there are three categories of investment,” he continues.
“One is tools that we buy. There are the open AIs of the world who are really good at providing tooling that is benefiting a larger crowd. The second one is what I call tunnel facing improvements. One of the recent successes when it comes to AI tooling is the bug triage tool within large organization action finding the right teams, finding the right individual who can address a certain problem becomes increasingly complex as the organization complexity grows.
“What we set out to achieve is to make sure that the very precious feedback that we get from our customers with regards to product gaps or bugs are addressed as early and as effectively as possible. And instead of having a dedicated set of people who actually had to spend time on this, we trained an agent which ultimately was able to very precisely assign the tickets to the right teams. Third category, and that is the customer facing improvement. We had a very successful MCP server launch earlier this year, we wanted to make sure that we enable all the millions of software engineers who work with location data to access best in class services that Tonto has to offer.”
Success for TomTom, he concludes, should be expressed in the delight that the company brings to its customers, mapping the world with accuracy real time and with the density of data.
“The detail of data that current and future use cases require is a humongous undertake, but I do believe that
with the agency capabilities, we were able to achieve that and create a representation of reality that is
delightful for the customer.
TomTom are sponsoring our podcasts from the ITS Australia Summit from next week, alongside AGD Systems Australia, TraceMark Flow – an NGIS solution, Westcotec, TRL and Nicander and Integrate ITS
(Pics: Courtesy of TomTom/Vimeo)
