Connect2Car: Connected Intelligence — Who Decides in the Intelligent Vehicle

The 27th annual Connect2Car at CES explores the vehicle has started making decisions. It routes, personalizes, authorizes payments, and updates itself, often without anyone asking. Connect2Car asks who is accountable when it does, what the driver actually gains, and whether the industry can make money on any of it. Six sessions cover AI, interfaces, commerce, cybersecurity, vehicle data, and startups.

This year’s event will cover these important and thought-provoking topics:

Permission to Act: Agentic AI and Accountability in the Vehicle

Description: In-vehicle AI is moving from assistants that answer questions to agents that take action: booking a charging session, rerouting a journey, scheduling service, ordering a failing part, renewing a subscription, or initiating a transaction. When AI moves from advice to action, three fundamental questions become unavoidable: What is the agent permitted to do? How do we know it works? And who is accountable when it gets it wrong?

Automotive has spent decades establishing rigorous systems for authority, validation, and accountability in the physical product. Agentic AI now brings many of those same questions into software-driven decisions. At the same time, automotive leaders face an equally important challenge: How do they turn AI investment into measurable business and customer value? OEMs, suppliers, and industrial manufacturers are under pressure to transform, yet many are still determining where to start, which technology partners to trust, which use cases deserve investment, and how to measure whether AI is actually improving the business.

This panel will examine both sides of the transformation. On the vehicle side: permission and authority, data access, validation, explainability, safety, and liability. On the enterprise side: selecting the right use cases and partners, establishing meaningful KPIs, aligning AI initiatives with business objectives, and ensuring AI investment and its impact are visible in the P&L.

Bringing together automotive, technology, safety, and business perspectives, the discussion will focus on the practical questions facing leadership teams today: Where should AI be permitted to act? Where can it create measurable value now? What evidence is required to trust it at scale? And how do companies distinguish real transformation from expensive experimentation?
Moderator: John Ellis – President USA & Head of Product - Codethink
Presenter: Madison Beebe – Director Software & Technology Strategy – Ford Motor Co.
Presenter: Georg Doll – CTO Automotive and Mobility – Microsoft
Presenters: Mamatha Chamarthi - CEO – Lumiom.ai, formerly with Goodyear and Stellantis
Presenters: TBA
Date: Wednesday, Jan. 6

Beyond the Dashboard: Rethinking the In-Vehicle Interface

Description: The dashboard is no longer where the interface lives. It has spread to the full width of the glass, to head-up and augmented reality projection, to exterior surfaces that project sound and images, and to ecosystems in which the vehicle is a remote node. We have access, awareness, and control through deeply integrated smartphones and wearables, Prolific sensors gather data that allow us to understand who is in the vehicle and their physiological and psychological condition. Even what they are bringing in with them. We understand their activities, their attention, and their intent. We understand where the vehicle was last, where it is headed, and its status. We understand the mechanical wellbeing of the vehicle and anticipate its next service. At the same time, the interface is continuously learning about who it is serving – adjusting physical and digital attributes and anticipating needs and desires. However, owners find little value and use for these technologies. They are not buying this intelligent, connected future and are now shopping for vehicles with simple tech – without complex network connections, limited functionality, and secure privacy. OEMs are creating “stripped down” capabilities and simplifying the driving experience. This panel will cover the contributors, consequences, and predict some outcomes of these tensions between emerging technologies, business and market dynamics, consumer behavior and more.
Moderator: Parrish Hanna – Global Director – N-Dream | KPIT
Presenter: Nicole Johnson – UX Manager – Scout
Presenter: Vishnu Sundaram – Chief Technology Officer – Gentherm
Presenters: TBA
Date: Wednesday, Jan. 6

SDV at Scale: Why Standard Data Decides Who Ships Faster

Description: Software-defined vehicles are shipping, and the constraint has shifted. The hard part is no longer whether a vehicle can update over the air or run cloud-connected services. It is that every automaker, supplier, and software provider still describes the same vehicle in a different language. A door ajar signal, a battery state of charge, a tire pressure reading: each carries a different name, structure, and meaning depending on the platform. Every new partnership starts with a translation project, and that cost repeats on every program, every model year, and every region. This panel examines the state of common vehicle data models, including COVESA's Vehicle Signal Specification, and what it takes to move from a shared vocabulary to production deployment. Discussion covers where standard signal definitions work today, where proprietary extensions are justified and where they are duplicated effort, how data models affect diagnostics, fleet operations, and downstream services, and what the industry gives up by continuing to translate rather than agree.
Moderator: Matt Jones – Executive Director - Global Technology Platforms - Ford Motor Company
Presenter: Prashant Gulati – CEO & Founder – SDVerse
Presenter: John Heinlein – Chief Marketing Officer – Sonatus
Presenter: John Heinlein – Executive Director – Cummins
Presenter: Thomas Bloor – Director of Automotive – RTI
Presenters: TBA
Date: Wednesday, Jan. 6

Frictionless Mobility: Reimagining In-Vehicle Transactions

Description: In-vehicle payment has been demonstrated at CES for a decade. The technology works. Adoption is still thin, and the reason is simple: the driver already has a phone within arm's reach that handles charging, parking, tolls, drive-through, and fuel. For the vehicle to win a transaction it has to be faster than reaching into a pocket, and it has to be trusted with an identity and a credential the driver did not have to re-enter. This panel brings together automakers, payment networks, financial institutions, charging and tolling operators, and identity specialists to examine what is converting today and what is still stuck in pilot, covering digital identity and how a vehicle proves who is behind the wheel, biometric and in-cabin authentication, tokenization and embedded wallets, plug and charge for EV sessions, tolling and parking interoperability across jurisdictions, subscriptions and feature purchases, and the privacy and regulatory constraints that differ by market. The panel also takes on the commercial question underneath all of it: when a purchase runs through the vehicle, the automaker, the payment network, and the merchant all have a claim on the customer relationship and the economics.
Moderator: Suzanne Murtha – Vice President Global Advanced Mobility, Payment Systems and Automation - AECOM
Presenter: Cathi Chinn – Vice President Innovation - Verra Mobility
Presenter: John Moon – Managing Director IVP - Mochanix
Presenter: Marc Gerban – Head of Product - Pairpoint
Presenter: JJ Eden – CEO & Executive Director - NCTA
Presenter: Elizabeth Weiland – Director of Automotive Payments - Mastercard
Presenters: TBA – TBA
Date: Wednesday, Jan. 6

AI, Cybersecurity, and the Price of Trust in Connected Mobility

Description: For most of the last decade automotive cybersecurity was a contest between skilled human researchers and slow-moving product cycles. That balance has changed. The same models that help defenders scan code, triage alerts, and detect anomalies across a fleet are available to whoever is on the other side, and they lower the skill and time required to find a weakness and act on it. At the same time the attack surface is now partly made of AI, and the models running in the vehicle and in the cloud have to be protected as assets. This panel brings together security researchers, automakers, suppliers, and regulatory voices to examine what changes when both offense and defense automate, covering AI-assisted threat detection and what it actually catches, securing the models and vehicle data AI systems depend on, software supply chain risk as vehicles absorb more third-party and open source code, and fleet-wide response when a vulnerability affects millions of vehicles already on the road. The panel also addresses what security costs and what a breach costs, and how the industry proves any of this to regulators and customers.
Moderator: Jennifer Dukarski – Emerging Technology, Automotive & Media Attorney – Butzel Long
Presenter: Joby Jester – Associate Partner Automotive Security - IBM
Presenter: Mostafa Elkoumy – Cheif Executive Officer - VxLabs
Presenter: Chuck Brokish – Director of Automotive & COVESA Security Group Lead - Green Hills Software
Presenter: John Heldreth – Founder & CEO - Automotive Security Research Group
Presenters: Bill Mazzara – Stellantis (Technical Fellow Cybersecurity) & Co-Chair Automotive Task Force and Board Member at Global Platform - Stellantis
Date: Wednesday, Jan. 6

From Garage to Global: Scaling Mobility Innovation

Description: Startups are not short on technology. They are short on time, and the automotive buying cycle is the thing that runs it out. A promising pilot can take eighteen months to become a purchase order, and by then the funding round, the program timing, and sometimes the sponsor inside the automaker have all changed. The companies that make it through are not always the ones with the best product. They are the ones that understood how the industry actually buys. This session pairs founders who have crossed that gap with the corporate innovation leaders who run the programs that let them in, covering how innovation hubs and accelerators work from the inside, what gets a startup through the door and what gets it dropped, the cost of validation, cybersecurity compliance, and quality requirements that startups rarely price in, and what investors now expect in a tighter funding market. The session also looks past the passenger car to trucking, construction equipment, buses, and off-highway equipment, where different duty cycles and different buyers can offer a faster path to scale.
Moderator: Steve Greenfield – CEO & Founder - Automotive Ventures
Presenters: TBA
Date: Wednesday, Jan. 6

*Speakers that are awaiting confirmation.