AI@Porsche – Usage potential of artificial intelligence at Porsche

The challenge

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly gaining in importance as an economic megatrend in many companies. Even in the automotive industry, AI offers many potential applications. Porsche AG set the goal to make all of their employees fit in this area and, in the first step, to create awareness. This is intended to assuage fears about the topic of automation and create acceptance for AI. By the end, the employees are to have a basic knowledge for the practical side, have a standardized understanding of AI and know its potential applications, both in general and in special cases at Porsche AG.

As the most successful manufacturer of exclusive sports cars and a brand for sporty mobility, Porsche also places the highest priority on training its employees – and thus on the quality of this training. The goal is to create an entertaining and interactive learning experience that is fun for the learners and sticks in their minds.

The solution

With this goal in mind, an interdisciplinary “AI@Porsche” team made up of experts and learning designers worked intensively alongside the e-learning pros from youknow. The outcome is astounding: The resulting learning module, “AI@Porsche,” is an interactive journey through a digital learning world and creates a learning experience that both entertains and motivates learners to engage with the potential applications of artificial intelligence at Porsche.

Inspired by point-and-click computer games rather than the learning content being shared by classic slides, the training takes learners on a journey through different rooms. In each of the eight rooms, various objects can be clicked, leading to content, films and interactions.

The training presents Porsche-specific applications of AI – a Porsche BOT, for example – and explains the underlying technology. This way the content is tangible to the learners and directly applicable to the Porsche world.

As the prior knowledge of the target group is very mixed, the learners can visit the library from the main menu at any time and brush up on the definitions and background knowledge for the most important terms.

As a bonus, across the entire training, the learners will collect hidden objects that can lead to an additional interaction at the end. All of these little tricks and gamification elements provide a learning experience that is fun and very memorable. Fears and worries about the topic of automation are assuaged in a fun way while creating acceptance for AI.

In the following video, you will get a feel for the training.

Application of the training

Porsche provides the learning module to all Porsche AG employees via its internal LMS. The employees can complete the learning offering on a voluntary basis. At the same time, Porsche is organizing a series of lectures and internal in-person events on the topic of AI (e.g. the public event series, AI Monday). Through the interplay between these events and the interactive learning module, the broad workforce is to identify additional use cases for the application of AI. In addition to this training, Porsche is using also further online offerings and corresponding in-person measures to train its experts.

Feedback and results

The e-learning project has been honored with the Comenius Medal 2020. Since 1995, the GPI – Gesellschaft für Pädagogik und Information e.V. (Association for Education and Information) – has been supporting ICT-based educational media that excels in terms of education, content and creativity with the Comenius-EduMedia award. In 2020 nearly 200 manufacturers, publishers, projects and authors from 14 countries submitted digital education projects to be subject to the manufacturer-independent quality check.

In the first six months, 400 Porsche employees have already completed the digital learning module. With the award and the accompanying development of the knowledge offensive “Fit for Digit@l,” the e-learning will gain even more awareness.

In hindsight, one thing is particularly important to Project Manager Matthias Görtz and the “AI@Porsche” project team: “For this topic, we deliberately backed a complex implementation and motivational learning design. Not only to be fun, but also so that we could reach each and everybody at Porsche and position AI as problem-free in the everyday. If the colleagues come to us with specific application cases, together we can utilize new technologies usefully at Porsche and take a large step into the digital transformation of the company. The trusting and creative collaboration with youknow was an important success factor here. The project team quickly got their heads around the matter and developed suitable ideas. The result is really astounding!”