Bosch Tech Compass Report Released at CES 2025; Focus on AI Skills

Bosch, the engineering and technology multinational, has released its Tech Compass 2025 report at CES 2025, taking place this week in Las Vegas. The theme of this year’s report, the fourth in the series, is public perceptions of technology and attitudes toward AI and whether people are ready for it.

Bosch surveyed 11,000 people from seven countries for the report: Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, the United Kingdom and the United States. It highlights regional differences in AI acceptance, with China and India showing more positive views and the growing importance of AI skills.

In this Q&A, Steffen Hoffmann, managing director of Bosch UK discusses the report’s findings and how Bosch is transforming its own business with AI, including ROB, a generative AI-powered HR assistant designed to help answer employees’ queries.

IoT World Today: Why did Bosch choose AI skills and attitudes for this year’s report?

Steffen Hoffmann: When AI started, you had quite extreme opinions. A lot of people were very enthusiastic and thought this was a huge game changer and it's going to be, it's going to change everything. At the other end of the spectrum, you had people who were quite skeptical, saying this was the end of the world and very dangerous.

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I think we're all moving more to the center, where we view it as something that might be very important and very helpful, but of course, some risks need to be managed.

The survey found that one in four people has received AI training in the workplace. Is this higher than expected?

If you compare it to two years ago, there would have been a fairly high ratio of people who had probably heard the term AI but didn't know what it was. I think these days, if you are working in a larger company, there is a good chance that you have seen use cases like people using ChatGPT for producing meeting minutes, so you probably have some sort of idea of what it is.

What did the report disclose about the perception of AI?

The first finding is that 66% of people say AI is the most influential technology of the next few years. Now that is, of course, a feeling, just people observing that that is the case. The need for training is the next step; if it’s so important, how much do I know and should I know more? We found that 61% of respondents said they had received no training in the workplace. But conversely, that means around 40% have received some sort of training, which is a pretty good result. We at Bosch have probably contributed to that because we have trained 65,000 people already.

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The question where I found the regional differences most interesting was “Do you agree that technological development makes the world a better place?” Significantly more people in China (88%) and India (84%) answered yes to that question. It’s much lower in Europe, just 47% in France and 57% in Germany. The U.K. (69%) and the U.S. (68%) are somewhere in between, but there is more skepticism in the West.

The survey respondents thought AI would still be the most influential tech even in 10 years. Is that surprising? 

It’s still too early to tell. I've always been fascinated by the smartphone and back in 1987 Bill Gates said that 20 years from now we will have a little pocket computer that will give us all sorts of information, it’s going to be your encyclopedia and so on. People thought at that time it was completely crazy and look what happened.

The smartphone has been the game changer that has revolutionized our lives. Will AI be in the same category? I honestly don't know. The smartphone takes away cumbersome tasks and makes us more efficient; you used to have to buy a map and navigate your way and have huge encyclopedias at home to look things up. AI goes in that direction.

Whether it will influence our perceived lifestyle the way the smartphone has, judging by simply looking at today's use cases that we have in the company or that I have used myself, I don't think so.

What are the use cases for AI at Bosch?

Most of our research and development people at Bosch have worked with AI, it has become very normal to have standard tasks aided by AI. That illustrates the way we view it right now; not necessarily a game changer at this point, simply a helpful tool that takes tasks that you can standardize, allowing people to focus on other things where AI is not yet in a position to help you.

We have a tool called ROB for human resources (HR). HR is complex and you have a lot of guidelines and labor laws to adhere to. If you have a complicated case, ROB works like ChatGPT; you type in a few words that describe the situation and then it pulls out all relevant guidelines, documents and laws that are available in the company in a compact, filtered way.

In the manufacturing environment, we have two plants using AI. One is at Stuttgart-Feuerbach, where they produce fuel injection equipment and the other one is at Hildesheim in the north of Germany, where they produce electric powertrains for cars.

The use cases are similar, AI helps detect failure patterns in production. It’s a learning system, so the more it's exposed to parts that have been identified as not good, the more it's capable of highlighting certain patterns in the process. That makes it much easier to manage the process and also improve the output of good parts.

This article first appeared in IoT World Today's sister publication AI Business.