ACT Expo 2026 Recap

Added: 2026-05-16

[00:00:02]Hi, it's John Heinlein, Chief Marketing Officer with Sonatas. We're here at ACT Expo 2026 in Las Vegas, Nevada, and I'm joined by Wally Siegel. Wally is Technical Fellow for Commercial Vehicles with Sonatas. Wally, you had an incredible 35-year career in Commercial Vehicles. You've seen everything imaginable. The key focus right now in the industry is AI, and AI is all around the show. What do you see as the opportunity for AI, and and how is AI impacting commercial? I I think the first thing is every OEM and Tier 1 is already has or is developing their own domain-specific AI.

[00:00:35]And within that AI, they're having domain-specific agents created. And that's one of the things we do, and that can scan span across manufacturing, maintenance, dealer networks, as well as the end customers. So, how do we help with the also with the pre-development, early V-cycle capabilities? And that can also be in the cloud. It can be the resources that are hosted in the vehicle. And there's also the need for the dynamic collection of data to serve all those workflows that we just talked about.

[00:01:10]Yeah, it's really true because people people think of AI as perhaps autonomous driving, and yeah, that's absolutely an important application. But there's so much more that can be done.

[00:01:18]Accelerating the design cycle, as you said, on the left side of the V, getting vehicles to production faster, which is so important. During operation for the OEM to diagnose problems, as well as for the fleet at a macro level to understand how they can make their fleet efficient.

[00:01:32]All of that Yes. are all applications of AI. AI is from the idea of a new vehicle all the way through its life cycle to decommission. Yes. Thank you so much.