Conversational artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping the in-car experience, transforming vehicle systems into intelligent, voice-driven companions. Today’s platforms combine advanced speech recognition with generative AI to enable seamless, hands-free control of navigation, entertainment, climate and more. What was once limited to simple commands has evolved into multi-step dialogue, proactive suggestions and interactions that blend voice, visuals and contextual cues.
The industry has now reached a pivotal moment with the rise of hybrid AI architectures. By combining embedded intelligence with cloud connectivity, these systems deliver fast, reliable and privacy-conscious responses. Increasingly, in-car assistants are also becoming more specialized — integrating with productivity applications and vehicle management tools to deliver value well beyond traditional infotainment.
Looking ahead, the focus is on making interactions even more natural and intuitive. Multimodal capabilities that interpret gestures, gaze and situational context promise to reduce driver distraction and create a more seamless digital experience. As AI continues to mature and vehicles become more connected, conversational assistants are poised to play a central role in personal mobility, safety and the broader digital ecosystem — fundamentally redefining how we interact with our cars.
To explore these developments further, we spoke with Nils Schanz, EVP of Product & Technology at Cerence AI. At the Consumer Electronic Show 2026 (CES 2026), Cerence AI is unveiling its latest hybrid platform, Cerence xUI. The platform features domain-specific AI agents, multimodal edge AI and advanced audio capabilities. Highlights include proactive vehicle management, dealership automation and voice-first productivity tools — all designed for flexible integration and continuous innovation across the automotive ecosystem.
Key takeaways:
- CES enables Cerence AI to engage directly with global original equipment manufacturer decision-makers, facilitating hands-on demonstrations and accelerating partnership formation and commercial execution.
- Cerence xUI, the showcased innovation, is a hybrid, scalable AI platform designed for flexible integration across hardware, software and language models, supporting diverse automotive development needs and expanding Cerence AI’s reach beyond the vehicle.
- Cerence AI’s generative AI strategy prioritizes modular, edge-based intelligence over cloud-only solutions, allowing OEMs to optimize cost, responsiveness and privacy while avoiding vendor lock-in.
- Multimodal interaction and power-efficient architecture are core to Cerence AI’s roadmap, enhancing intuitive in-cabin experiences and supporting OEM sustainability targets through embedded AI and strategic hardware partnerships.
The following is an edited transcript of the conversation.
S&P Global Mobility: How does CES uniquely advance Cerence AI’s strategic priorities compared to other industry events?
Nils Schanz: CES is the central meeting point for global automakers and technology companies shaping the next generation of user experiences.
For Cerence AI, CES is uniquely valuable because it brings together OEMs from every market we serve in one place. That concentration of decision-makers enables deeper conversations about real production timelines, platform strategies and deployment challenges.
Most importantly, CES allows us to show rather than tell. In-car AI experiences are difficult to evaluate on slides, but there is an immediate understanding when you experience them firsthand. When customers can sit in a vehicle, interact with the technology themselves, and see how it behaves under real-world constraints, discussions quickly shift from ideas to execution. That ability to put the future directly in customers’ hands is what consistently makes CES a catalyst for meaningful partnerships and commercial momentum.
What core innovations or launches are you highlighting at CES 2026, and how do they align with your current roadmap?
We are showcasing the latest advancements for Cerence xUI, our hybrid, agentic AI platform that we developed to advance the in-car experience and meet the realities of today’s automotive development cycles. OEMs want to deliver LLM-based experiences while also facing growing pressure to innovate quickly, avoiding rigid technology stacks or single-vendor dependencies. Cerence xUI is built to scale across diverse hardware, software and language models.
From an end-user perspective, xUI advances the in-car assistant from a reactive system into a more natural, proactive, and context-aware companion. Multi-step conversational threads, multimodal inputs, and deeper personalization allow drivers to interact in ways that better reflect real-world intent.
We are also highlighting our expanding ecosystem of purpose-built, domain-specific AI agents. This includes our mobile work agent, developed with Microsoft, which brings voice-first access to Microsoft 365 Copilot into the car; the dealer assist agent that supports automotive dealerships with intelligent automation across sales and service workflows; and the ownership companion agent that proactively helps drivers manage vehicle health, service needs and feature adoption.
Together, these demonstrations reflect a roadmap focused on continuity of experience across the broader automotive lifecycle — an important push for Cerence as we expand beyond the vehicle.
How is Cerence AI integrating generative AI and large language models into its in-car assistant platform, and what new value does this create for OEMs?
The industry’s early enthusiasm for generative AI has been largely cloud-centric, but that approach does not fit the realities that OEMs are grappling with. Running LLMs entirely in the cloud introduces rising operational costs, inconsistent latency and growing privacy concerns — all of which become more pronounced as AI usage increases across millions of vehicles.
Cerence AI has taken a different view: edge intelligence is not optional, it is foundational. xUI is designed as a hybrid, modular platform that enables meaningful LLM-powered reasoning to run directly in the vehicle via an SLM, or with the cloud. This allows OEMs to better control costs, ensure responsiveness and design privacy-first experiences that do not depend on constant connectivity.
Overall, our approach to generative AI is grounded in flexibility and long-term viability. xUI is hybrid, modular and technology-agnostic by design, allowing OEMs to integrate LLM-powered intelligence into vehicles without being locked into a single model, vendor or deployment strategy.
What progress is Cerence AI making in multimodal interaction, and how will these capabilities enhance the in-cabin experience?
Multimodal interaction is a critical step toward more intuitive in-car AI, and xUI is designed from the ground up to support these capabilities. By combining voice, visual context and environmental inputs, the in-car assistant can better understand both the user’s intent and the situation in which a request is made.
Cerence AI is advancing these capabilities through partnerships with multiple chipmakers, enabling multimodal processing directly on-device. This allows the assistant to respond faster, operate reliably without constant connectivity, and maintain automotive-grade safety and privacy standards.
For drivers and passengers, multimodality reduces friction. The assistant can reference what is visible on the screen, understand situational context and adapt responses accordingly, minimizing the need for repeated commands or clarifications. Over time, these capabilities help shift in-car interaction away from task-by-task voice commands toward more natural, exchanges that align with how people expect digital systems to behave.
How is Cerence AI improving the efficiency and sustainability of its solutions to support OEM environmental goals?
Efficiency is increasingly central to OEM decision-making, and power consumption is one of the most common concerns we hear from customers. Drivers expect intelligent features to work everywhere, but cloud-only approaches increase connectivity dependence, latency and energy usage.
Cerence addresses this through a hybrid AI architecture that balances embedded and cloud intelligence. With embedded AI handling time-critical interactions and privacy-sensitive processing, and the cloud enriching experiences when connectivity allows, OEMs can deliver consistent performance without unnecessary energy overhead.
A key example is our collaboration with SiMa.ai, which brings CaLLM Edge — our automotive-grade embedded small language model — to the SiMa.ai Modalix MLSoC. This enables conversational AI experiences that are responsive, resilient and significantly more power-efficient than cloud-dependent approaches.
By aligning software architecture with power-efficient hardware, Cerence helps OEMs meet their sustainability goals while still delivering advanced AI capabilities that are production-ready and scalable across vehicle platforms.
