Paris in October is where the industry shows its hand. Concept cars, new technologies, and bold ambitions will abound. But beneath the excitement of the Mondial de l’Auto lies a more pressing question: how can automakers restore profitability and protect market share while accelerating electrification, software-defined vehicles, strengthening supply chain resilience while preparing next generation of mobility – all at once and all now?

Disruption is accelerating and there is no time to wait

The pressure on the industry is felt strongly because of the disruption coming mostly from China where competitors are moving faster, cheaper, and reinventing customer experience. The pressure on established automakers is intensifying. Chinese players have raised the bar dramatically – on cost, speed to market and customer experience – forcing the rest of the industry to respond on all fronts, and fast.

The scale of the challenge is already visible. Our 2026 Automotive Engineering and R&D Pulse report shows that engineering leaders are targeting a 15-20% reduction in cost, a 10-15% shorter design and development cycle, and a 5-10% faster production ramp-up within the next two to three years.

Falling behind means further erosion of market share and competitiveness. But achieving these gains simultaneously cannot come from incremental improvements or isolated initiatives. It requires a fundamental shift in how automakers develop products, run operations and engage with customers.

Technology is ready. The transformation starts now.

The good news is that the technology to move the needle is already here. AI, automation, digital twins and software-defined approaches can deliver material gains in cost, speed and customer experience today.

Automakers do not need to wait for a major organizational transformation to get started. Start with the business outcome, redesign the way the work gets done using the technology now available, and let the organization evolve with it. Speed matters: transformation will increasingly happen through action, not before it.

This is already happening. AI adoption is accelerating rapidly across the industry. The challenge is no longer getting started – it is turning individual successes into impact at scale.

Ambitions abound but impact ‘at scale’ remains elusive

The shift is already underway. Software, now at the heart of the vehicle, is being accelerated by AI across development, testing and validation. Digital twins and virtualization are moving validation earlier in the development cycle, making it faster, more robust and more cost-efficient. AI is opening up new opportunities across engineering, operations and the customer experience.

AI has moved to the core of automotive companies’ strategies. Yet our experience – and our research – show that the gap between ambition and execution remains considerable. Initiatives and use cases are multiplying, but too few are translating into measurable impact at scale. The issue is no longer access to technology. It is the ability to scale it fast enough and embed it into the way the business operates.

Why buying building blocks will not close the gap

The instinctive response to a growing gap is to buy something. A copilot for developers. A platform for data. An agent for the service desk. Each may demonstrate value, deliver a successful pilot… and yet too often, the impact stops there.

The reason is simple: the visible part of an AI capability is the tip of the iceberg.

Picture an iceberg. Above the waterline sits the agent everyone wants to see – the thing that writes the test case, triages the field failure, proposes the design change. Below the waterline sit the legacy systems it has to read from, the fragmented data it has to trust, the integration debt between the requirements tool and the simulation environment, the undocumented code nobody has dared to touch since the last platform generation, and the tacit knowledge that sits in the brains of your most experienced workers… Much of it remains inaccessible to AI.

An agent or any AI-based system – from a code-writing agent to a PLM environment or an autonomous driving model – is only as capable as the context and data it can access and the trust that can be placed in its outputs. Scaling AI therefore requires more than connecting technology: it requires reliable enterprise context, redesigned underlying processes and the right governance and guardrails, defining what agents can access, what decision they can make, how they can interact with other agents and systems and where human oversight remains essential.

Without context, trust and effective governance, there is no AI at scale.

For tangible outcomes, insist on end-to-end solutions

This is what we, Capgemini, are bringing to Paris: an end-to-end approach built around outcomes, not individual technologies. The objective is not to add another layer of tools, but to transform complete value streams by combining automotive expertise, engineering, software, AI and enterprise technology.

In practice, this means applying AI across the full product lifecycle: connecting customer insights to requirements, accelerating software development, simulation and validation, enabling digital-first development of the physical product, and closing the loop with vehicles in the field. It also means making AI itself enterprise-ready: trusted, auditable and governed, with the right guardrails and agent governance in place to deploy it at scale. The differentiator is not any one of these capabilities. It is making them work together.

That means tackling the whole iceberg: connecting fragmented data and technology landscapes, making enterprise knowledge accessible to people and agents, and orchestrating AI across existing processes and systems. This is where the combination of deep automotive and engineering expertise, AI and IT capabilities, and a world-leading technology ecosystem, matter. Applied end to end against a measurable business outcome, it can translate technology into what the industry needs now: lower cost, greater speed and better customer experiences – at scale.

Put your number on the table

We’re not inviting you to see another PoC.

Come with a business outcome you need to achieve – cost to take out, cycle time to compress, ramp-up to accelerate, customer experience to reinvent. Put a number on it.

Then work backward from that number: decide what you can transform yourself and where you need a partner able to bring together automotive expertise, technology and execution, and commit alongside you to the outcome.

Join us at the Paris Motor Show for an insight-packed program of demos, conferences and conversations with our automotive and technology experts and partners. Put your number on the table and together let’s make it real.