Watch: SEAT's Rafael Sanchez Aviles on upskilling for digitalisation and the evolving human-AI relationship
At Automotive Logistics & Supply Chain Digital Strategies Europe, Rafael Sanchez Aviles, manager of customer-driven supply chain at SEAT, spoke about the company's AI roadmap and the need to upskill people as it moves towards agentic AI.
Speaking to Automotive Logistics on the Red Sofa at ALSC Digital Strategies Europe, Rafael Sanchez Aviles, manager of customer-driven supply chain at SEAT, followed up on his presentation about SEAT's roadmap to agentic AI and a panel session on what goes into building an AI roadmap by discussing the importance of quality data and correctly-skilled people in this digitalisation process.
Priorities for digitalisation
"Data is important," he said. " We must have a clear data strategy based on a modern platform, like Snowflake, that has all the relevant logistics data, and we must have this data clean, structured and able to be used in different use cases."
He emphasised the necessity of a "single source of truth for data" and noted that upskilling people is "fundamental". Ensuring success in these two factors, he said, will be a crucial part of SEAT's AI and digitalisation roadmap, before the full potential of agentic AI can be unlocked.
A human-in-the loop approach
SEAT's human-in-the-loop approach keeps humans in control. While agents take information and make autonomous decisions when it comes to easy, low-impact decisions, but the high-level, high-impact decisions are left to humans. Agents propose actions, but the final decision lies with humans.
Ultimately, Aviles shared his view that humans collaborating with technology is the best way forward. He referenced SEAT's HAi project – a company-wide programme aiming to combine human expertise and artificial intelligence. Shared at the ALSC Digital Strategies Europe event in 2024, the programme was designed to accelerate AI use across five key pillars: people, technologies, data, governance, and business processes.
Its important, Aviles said, that leaders and colleagues understand that AI "an opportunity, not a threat." He explained how it can be used to increase productivity on a daily basis.
"We need to skill up people on different levels," he said. "Some people need no-code or low-code training just to do basic things... other [people] go to a further level, maybe with just basic programming like in Python or in SQL, but this is definitely our point of view – different people having different skills."
