From mundane tools like lawnmowers to fantastical concept cars that get to know their drivers, just about every innovation showcased at CES 2023 was infused with AI. While some products took the form of "robots," others invisibly leveraged AI capabilities to make everyday products smarter and more useful. As AMD CEO Lisa Su said in her keynote address, "AI is truly the most important megatrend for the future of tech." Advancements in autonomous driving haven't developed as quickly as some imagined they would. However, cars are incrementally becoming smarter and smarter, with autonomy seemingly just over the horizon.

When the Tesla Model S was released a decade ago, it was unlike anything else on the market. And I'm not talking about the fact that it's electric -- I mean the interior design. Franz von Holzhausen, Tesla's lead designer, put an enormous 17-inch vertical touchscreen in the center of the car. It dominates the dash, and you control nearly everything in the car through it -- for better or worse. "Everything that we do at Tesla has to be beautiful," said von Holzhausen in July 2017 at the launch of the Tesla Model 3. "But beauty is only great if it's functional."

Altran's parent, Capgemini, is combining the engineering skills of Altran with its data infrastructure and has launched a service for end to end support for validation and verification of driverless car systems. Altran also includes Cambridge Consultants in the UK which has been developing AI and sensor technologies for autonomous systems. The validation technology is being used by the maker of Citroen, Peugeot and Opel-Vauxhall cars to manage thousands of petabytes of data from testing the next generation of driverless cars. "We wanted to work with Capgemini and Altran because of their strong skills in data oriented and cloud- based projects. Participating in a European innovation project for the automotive industry in the field of the connected and autonomous car is very challenging. This collaboration enables us to complete our data collection and processing on schedule, and helps us to deploy innovative solutions for data analysis methods on a hybrid-cloud based solution," said Jean-Louis Sauvaget, Research & Development Division, Expert car data acquisition and post processing for customer usage in Groupe PSA.

When I talk to people about artificial intelligence, or AI, they're often optimistic about how they think AI will improve their lives in the future. What they aren't thinking about is sweaters. Specifically, how based on previous online behaviors an e-tailer knows that you're in the market for a warm, blue sweater instead of a long-sleeved gray shirt. Historically, businesses required human interaction in order to understand exactly what a customer needed. Thanks to lots of data and AI, companies now know exactly what you want, when you want it and how you want it.

Like nearly all of the other major car makers, Peugeot believes the next generation of cars will be autonomous. We've already seen the Instinct Concept -- which imagines a future where vehicles blend self-driving tech, home automation and cloud connectivity to deliver the best riding experience -- but to get there, the company needs to do the hard miles. Thanks to a partnership with MIT spin-off nuTonomy, the French carmaker has begun doing just that with the launch of a new self-driving pilot in Singapore. Under the agreement, nuTonomy's self-driving software and "specialized sensors" will be installed in customized Peugeot 3008s over the course of this summer and then unleashed on Singapore's streets in September. Should it be a success, both companies will consider expanding the pilot to more cities, allowing them to better understand how the vehicles behave in urban environments and assess how drivers interact with the automated systems.

Some concept cars aren't really cars and stop at the concept part. But Peugeot's new Instinct concept car has a couple of interesting ideas. In particular, the interior will change depending on the driving mode (active driving or self-driving). Peugeot unveiled the car at MWC today in Barcelona. I generally hate concept cars are they are mostly unimplementable designs that won't ever make their way to a commercial car.