Sonatus Innovation & Technology Culture

What types of products or services does your engineering team build? What problem are you solving for customers?

I work on our AI Technician product, which is software designed to help service technicians quickly diagnose and resolve vehicle issues. For example, a technician can ask the AI how to troubleshoot an error reported by a vehicle sensor and the AI will analyze the problem and recommend actionable steps to fix it. Our goal is to make vehicle diagnostics faster, more accurate and less reliant on individual experience.

Tell us about a recent project where your team used AI as a tool. What was it meant to accomplish? How did you use AI to assist?

We use AI as a coding assistant on most of our projects. It’s not always about adopting AI for a specific task; often, it’s about leveraging LLM-based tools to help write software more efficiently. In one recent example, I needed to convert a binary file into a human-readable table. Reading binary data manually is time-consuming, but using Gemini, I was able to generate a Python script that converted it into a CSV in seconds.

What would that project have looked like if you didn't have AI as a tool to use? 

Without AI, that task would have taken much longer and I would have had to manually figure out how to parse and process the binary data. While AI speeds up tasks, it isn’t perfect. LLMs can overcomplicate simple problems or generate buggy code that tries to patch symptoms rather than fixing the root cause. Used correctly, AI dramatically improves productivity, but it’s important to remain critical and not become overly dependent on it.

What is the unique story that you feel your company has with AI? 

Automotive AI is actually the culmination of software-defined vehicles. Sonatus’s mission since its founding has been to accelerate the adoption of software-defined vehicles in the auto industry, enabling vehicles to be flexible, updatable, and dynamic. With AI, it now allows us to add intelligence to that list and enable compelling new capabilities that were not possible before.

What was a monumental moment for your team when it comes to your work with AI?

For some context, one of our products, Collector AI, helps OEMs collect vehicle data that enables specific inquiries and evolves them over time through event-driven collection policies. Vehicle engineers can easily create policies through a graphical user interface or, if they want, by directly editing JavaScript Object Notation code. But these approaches require detailed knowledge of the vehicle by an expert engineer.

One monumental moment was when we were also developing an AI enhancement to make it easier for more users inside the OEM, not just technical experts, to use the product. This enhancement enabled them to describe in natural language what they wanted to collect based on specific trigger conditions. While experimenting, we discovered that the tool could intelligently identify useful, relevant information that exceeded our original expectations when we wrote our queries. The AI was able to really understand the intent of the query, and we realized that AI could serve as a thought partner to our users, not only helping them to be more efficient but also helping them to do their work better. We are now rolling out this capability as a fundamental new feature of our product. 

AI is a constantly evolving field. Very few people coming into these roles have years of experience to pull from. Explain what continuous learning looks like on your team. How do you learn from one another and collaborate?

We collectively read a lot. Everything from academic papers to Medium articles and blog posts to market and industry reports. We have weekly technology team sessions where team members “show and tell” on a rotating cadence over cutting-edge topics, both AI and non-AI. Team members are encouraged to attend conferences and symposia and the company supports it. The only condition is to provide a trip report presentation to share your learnings with others!