MARCH 2017:
At our first think tank on driverless cars,
What Will the Driverless Car Experience Be for Consumers?
, we explained to our audience that driverless cars would be on the road within three years (albeit, not Level 5 fully autonomous cars) and that this technology was going to develop so quickly that we should all start asking ourselves what type of experience we wanted to have in driverless cars. Many people in the audience were stunned at the realization that driverless cars real and not scifi. We gave attendees several problems to solve including designing the interior of driverless cars and detailing what they, as consumers, want to seen inside of Level 5 autonomous vehicles. Finally, we asked them to all become advertisers and marketers and to develop a marketing strategy and advertising campaign that would sell a potentially wary consumer on the new driverless car experience.
A FEW MONTHS LATER, APRIL 2017,
we brought in the big dogs for
Driverless Trucks – Here’s How They Will Disrupt Everything
If you think driverless cars are going to be a hugely disruptive to society, we told the audience, just wait until you hear about the driverless trucks that will soon barrell down our highways with ease, transporting tons of goods across America. We presented the audience with
several role-playing problems
including exploring how recruiters at trucking companies might find ways to appeal to a new generation of technically skilled employees and the role of software developers in the landscape. One year later, furthering our discussion on driverless trucks, we hosted another think tank,
Ask the Experts: Will the Trucker Job Shortage Crisis Speed Up the Adoption of Driverless Trucks?
, that explored the impact of driverless trucks on a shrinking trucker workforce.
The problems we face rolling out autonomous vehicles across America is hardly limited to hardware, labor upskilling and logistics. In 2018, at our special presentation,
Self-Driving Cars and Consumer Data – Protecting Consumers Before It’s Too Late
, we brought in the lead policy advisor for
Cruise Automation
(the driverless car division of
General Motors
) and asked him to present to us the plan for acquiring, using and protecting consumer data in their driverless cars. In turn, our audience gave him specific suggestions for how data might be managed and asked targeted questions that the
Cruise
team should consider on on managing consumer data. It was an informative and inpsiring experience and demonstrated how savvy our audience had become on this topic and their ability to have a substantive and enlightening conversation with experts about it. Woot-woot!