Smart mobility AI technologies, from factory floors to in-vehicle tech to physical AI on the street, is the automobile industry and its newly extended supply chain partners are building today. Enterprise tech opportunities are abundant, despite challenges ranging from legacy tech to compliance, security, and integration.
In this report, experts and executives for Lenovo, Cox Automotive, Carnegie Mellon University’s’s Heinz College, Percepta, SAP, Cognizant, TERN, Fractal, and AIR (Automated Industrial Robotics) talk smart mobility, explain the new business opportunities emerging, and walk us through the latest tech.
How Big Is Smart Mobility and What Enterprise Tech Business Opportunities Are Opening Up
A March 2026 Fortune Business Insight report valued smart mobility at $61.95 billion in 2026 and projected the sector to reach $255.75 billion by 2034. However, the reports did not consider the wider gains of the global automotive industry where smart mobility is gaining ground. That industry alone is globally worth anything from 2.5 to 4 trillion, depending on who you are asking, with some projections saying the industry will hit $8 trillion by 2035.
In this high-growth environment, leading players, from Toyota, Hyundai, Volkswagen, Tesla, and GM, to name just some, have all announced heavy investments in smart mobility and AI.
“Smart mobility is one of the fastest-growing segments of the AI economy, fueled by autonomous systems, connected infrastructure, electric vehicles, and intelligent transportation networks,” Robert Daigle, director and global head of enterprise AI and high-performance computing HPC solutions at Lenovo, told me.
“The dominant players include autonomous driving companies, traditional automotive original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) as well as computer providers,” said Daigle.
The biggest opportunities are in the technologies that enable mobility at scale, Daigle explained.
This includes AI infrastructure, edge computing, sensors, cybersecurity, digital twins, networking, and data platforms. “As transportation becomes more intelligent, demand for real-time computing and AI orchestration will grow significantly,” said Daigle.
“Ford, BMW and GM are all investing heavily in AI-powered vehicle experiences, but that’s only part of the story,” Thomas Monaghan, President at Percepta, a joint venture between TTEC Holdings, Inc. (TTEC) and Ford Motor Company, told me. The harder challenge? Achieving truly autonomous driving at scale, said Monaghan.
On the other hand, Vijay Narayan, Global Head of Physical AI, Cognizant, told me that the smart mobility supply chain is evolving into a connected ecosystem where value is increasingly driven by data, software, and intelligence.
As vehicles rely more on software, they become more connected. As a result, automotive companies have new opportunities to create revenue streams through digital services, predictive maintenance, fleet management, and personalized mobility experiences, said Narayan.
“Right now, the dominant players are suppliers, not automakers, as suppliers are constantly pitching new smart technologies to the companies that build cars,” Sean Tucker, Senior Editor at Cox Automotive, Inc. told me.
“The early opportunities are things that don’t require public infrastructure investment,” said Tucker.
How Smart Mobility is Changing Factory Floors: Lights-out and Flexible Reconfiguration Production
From retrofitting legacy equipment to managing compliance and labor issues, to moving from dashboard data visualization-driven decisions to autonomous orchestration, smart manufacturing is entering a new phase.
“Smart manufacturing has ceased to be an infrastructure challenge and has become a decision-making challenge,” Christian Struve, cofounder and CEO of Fracttal, a company integrating AI, physical sensors, and IoT, to centralize operations, told me.
The real transformation isn’t happening in new factories, but in those building an intelligence layer on top of twenty- or thirty-year-old existing plant infrastructure integrating AI, sensors, and other IoT devices.
“The new element in this cycle is the shift from systems that simply provide information to systems that recommend and orchestrate actions,” said Struve, highlighting the importance of keeping humans in the loop.
Bill Newman, Industry Executive adviser at SAP, spoke to me about lights-out manufacturing.
“Lights-out manufacturing is not only technologically feasible, but also a reality in many operational areas,” said Newman.
“While we always recommend to ‘keep humans in the loop,’ we are looking into cognitive and physical AI strategies, everything from better orchestrating automated ground vehicles (AGVs) to even future-state humanoid robot solutions where manufacturing and warehouse capabilities can be directed and aligned to physical tasks,” said Newman.
Automation of automobile manufacturing, Newman said, while being a sensitive topic in labor discussions, is also being considered under the growing shortage of available and capable workforce to execute key tasks in manufacturing and other operational areas.
Going specific and technical into robotics, Darragh de Stonndún, founder and CEO of AIR (Automated Industrial Robotics), a worldwide industrial automation company, told me that most of what has been sold as smart manufacturing over the last decade produced visibility, not capability.
“Plants now have more data than they’ve ever had and roughly the same ability to act on it; dashboards multiplied, decisions didn’t,” said de Stonndún. The last mile, said de Stonndún, is turning an inference into a physical action inside a validated, regulated, running production environment.
AI smart manufacturing systems, which are not fixed automation cells and “learn”, also have to prove to regulators, quality organizations, and customer audit teams that they will behave the same way tomorrow as they did today, said de Stonndún.
De Stonndún also noted that the rapid pace of innovation can backfire. “The automation bottleneck in smart mobility isn’t at the assembly plant — it’s two and three tiers down, in power electronics, battery components, sensors and connectors, where volumes are rising fast, but product designs are still changing every twelve to eighteen months, said de Stonndún.
“The opportunity is flexible, reconfigurable production that survives a design change instead of being obsoleted by one,” said de Stonndún.
Inside the Car: Customer Experience, Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) and Independent Vehicle Intelligence
Inside cars and other transportation units, smart mobility is driving a transformation on two fronts: the customer experience, and the back-end tech side linked to navigation, safety, autonomous driving, and physical AI on the streets.
The question automakers are answering today is what AI they will put inside their vehicles. An AI provided by big tech and AI companies in partnerships, one outsourced from third-party AI developers, or one built in-house? GM’s recent call to build their own AI is therefore a notable shift in the supply chain, Raj Rajkumar, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College, told me.
However, Rajkumar said that he sees potential in open-source and open-weight models that can be optimized by the OEMs directly becoming significantly important as the process evolves.
Besides customer experience, other in-vehicle technologies stand out due to their sophistication and use cases. For example, Monaghan from Percepta said vehicle-to-everything (V2X) technology may become even more important than many of the AI features inside the vehicle for its potential to prevent or mitigate crashes by allowing vehicles and infrastructure to exchange safety information in real time.
Many of these new smart mobility technologies, however, face a big adoption hurdle because they depend on street infrastructure, specific sensors, and other edge AI hardware that is not being deployed in all areas equally.
TERN, an Austin-based technology company developing signal-independent positioning infrastructure for defense, fleet, and intelligent mobility applications, has developed new positioning technologies that deliver intelligent, independent navigation without relying on satellites, signals, or external infrastructure.
Positioning technologies are foundational in providing vehicles the intelligence they need to act within the physical world they operate.
“Every intelligent vehicle depends on knowing where it is, yet that has traditionally been delivered by external systems,” said Shaun Moore, CEO and cofounder of TERN.
“The vehicle therefore needs enough intelligence to understand and act within the physical
“Position can now become a native vehicle capability,” said Moore.
“Physical AI requires intelligence at the edge, but it should not require intelligent infrastructure on every street,” said Moore, highlighting the costs of building and maintaining smart mobility physical AI systems and the gaps that will always exist across every city, rural road, work site, or emergency environment.
“The strongest architecture puts essential intelligence inside the vehicle and treats outside infrastructure as a useful input when available, not the sole authority,” said Moore.
Smart Mobility On the Street: Physical AI Wins and Challenges
While independent in-car AI technologies are poised to play a game-changing role, they will co-exist with physical AI infrastructure, especially in smart cities and larger urban centers where local governments are increasingly deploying the new tech.
“Smart mobility requires intelligence close to where decisions happen,” Daigle, from Lenovo, told me, highlighting, as an example, the work Lenovo has done to transform Barcelona into a smart city using physical AI.
The future of autonomous mobility won’t depend solely on smarter vehicles; it will also require smarter infrastructure, Daigle explained. “Connected roads, traffic systems and vehicles working together will make assisted driving more predictive instead of simply reactive,” said Daigle.
Physical AI infrastructure, hardware, software, and services are also opportunities for tech enterprises, but specific conditions roadblock deployment.
Tucker from Cox Automotive said that in the U.S., much of the road infrastructure is built by state and local governments. This means that companies offering new physical AI technologies that want to go national must talk to thousands of governments to greenlight their tech, facing different compliance demands and tax bases in each state.
“The technologies are exciting,” said Cox. “The practical reality of implementing them is a massive, generations-long hurdle,” he added.
Cybersecurity Business Opportunities in Smart Mobility
As cars, vehicles, and transportation systems become smarter and increasingly more connected to individuals and streets, cybersecurity business opportunities emerge to respond to the current threat landscape where every public critical services industry is a top target for cybercriminals and nation-state threat actors.
“Cybersecurity needs to be built into the architecture from day one,” Daigle from Lenovo said. Organizations must focus on data protection, AI governance, software integrity, and regulatory compliance, said Daigle.
“Trust and security will be essential to scaling smart mobility solutions successfully,” said Daigle.
Monaghan from Percepta highlighted that laws are still playing catch-up with new smart mobility technologies.
“The pace of personalization is currently outstripping the pace of governance,” said Monaghan.
Combined with rapidly evolving privacy regulations across different countries, organizations that build strong governance and compliance practices will create a meaningful competitive advantage, said Monaghan.
Final Thoughts on Smart Mobility
While much of the cutting-edge smart mobility tech is only being rolled out today in select locations, expansion is inevitable, as all automakers and the expanded supply chain push in that direction.
Whether it be through smart manufacturing, independent in-car systems, or through physical AI, the siloes and gaps and the room for optimization of operations represent significant new doorways for tech enterprise companies, small, medium, and large, to do business. Compliance demands and new AI laws also open up opportunities for cybersecurity companies. As the automobile industry continues to grow, the real transformation is the expanded enterprise tech supply chain.
