I am pleased to talk to you today about some of the major challenges and opportunities emerging in the new era of mobility. I am also pleased that the WTC is putting efforts to promote innovation initiatives by sharing insights, intelligence, and action points with government bodies across Europe. 

The World Technology Congress is a global community devoted to purpose-driven innovation.  But what kind of innovation are we talking about? We are certainly not talking about creating another app, website, or SAAS solution. 

We are talking about innovations that take a vertical leap and are centered around providing a long-lasting solution that benefits everyone. They represent a new and more efficient approach, unlike horizontal solutions that take already proven solutions to global markets, as Peter Thiel explained.

The iPhone is a great example of vertical innovation that has made a difference in our lifetime. In contrast, smartphone companies that emerged out of China are a great example of horizontal globalization. This kind of innovation in vertical leaps is about creating a real impact through brand new ways, while the other approach focuses on market share.

However, what is there to globalize if no one took that vertical leap in the first place? 

The vertical leaps of innovation are built on a foundation of meaningful vision and a deep understanding of the challenges and opportunities that the future brings, and to generate the right ideas on how to meet them. I would like to share my own experience through the lens of our company, Laureti Group, to illustrate this point. Let me offer a little background here. 

I am the founder and CEO of Laureti Group. 

The concept of Laureti was born in 2017 as I traveled through India researching Electric Vehicle production on behalf of the former chairman and shareholder of Aston Martin Lagonda, Tim Hearley. Tim was planning to revive Jensen into the EV space and knew that to be successful he had to better understand the technology and the manufacturing detail behind them. I was contracted to help him.

Tim and I shared a passion for this space and a vision of how the industry was going to take shape over the next century. Whilst Tim is no longer with us I remain as passionate about the idea as I was on my first trip. That is why I founded Laureti. Laureti is a mobility-tech company that is creating a global solution that puts human-centered needs at the heart of mobility.

The concept of “Passenger Centricity” came to me on a particularly tiring journey between sites in India. For every 2 hours spent on-site meetings, I spent 4 hours traveling. The cycle repeated for months. 

In every car journey, I noticed all the gadgetry and access to controlling amenities sat the driver. My experience as a passenger was nothing more than a cargo at the rear seat. The time spent was unproductive and exhausting. 

This was not only a frustrating experience for me but also an experience commonly shared by every businessman, executive, and many busy families we interviewed. 

Today, our research shows that 290 million hours are wasted globally each year on unproductive and disconnected travel in cars. This is where Laureti is concentrating its efforts.

Far from traveling down the route of being another electric vehicle manufacturer, Laureti is helping to define the passenger-experience Economy.

100 years ago we had horses and carts, today we have cars and we are already well on our way to autonomous cars. With each new iteration of travel, we see a new industry and a new economy evolving in each step. 

Over the past decade, we’ve seen a rapid decline in car ownership as the popularity of ride-hailing and on-demand services has soared. By the end of this decade, private ownership of cars will be eclipsed by on-demand services. This is a transitional period for the Automotive Industry that will increasingly force the focus less on the driver and more and more frequently on the passenger.

For the last 100 years, cars have been about the driver, the next 100 will be about the passenger.

But how are we preparing for this? 

Would it be sufficient to make electric vehicles quickly and churn out in high volumes across all regions? Is that a complete solution? NO.

I am not here to pitch Laureti. But I really want to focus on the paradigm shift. 

We started Laureti as an EV company. Back then Electric vehicle space was exciting and we wanted a market share in it.  Soon after, we put innovation at the center of our efforts. We came to really understand the future challenges and how people would interact with transportation. Then, we decided to that vertical leap. The vertical leap of innovation of Laureti emerged out of a simple but important question. If you don’t have to drive a car anymore what would do in it? 

Every advancement in autonomous technologies will reduce the role of the driver and put more emphasis on passenger experience. We can’t wait until autonomous cars hit the roads to start to focus on this. It will be too late. But it's the transition towards it- that matters. That is why we are creating a passenger-centric future that is seamless, productive, and accessible. 

At Laureti, we believe that mobility can be harnessed as a useful tool for people rather than a stressful necessity. We want to give back the richness of time to people during their journey to a more productive life. 

We are building an industry-first solution that has a software, hardware, and service combination to make the entire travel experience productive, connected, and secure. Laureti’s core product is a flexible in-cabin design that goes into any partnered vehicle program to provide passenger-centric EVs at scale. In other words, a mobile business lounge experience that is portable to any selected vehicle. 

The hardware part is everything that comes in contact with the occupant in the car. The Software is the backbone architecture that allows the in-cabin experience and beyond-the-vehicle door assistance. 

 Allow me to go deeper into our software part. At the center of the Laureti ecosystem, we have MiRA.OS, is a privacy-respecting AI-powered platform that provides 100% digital freedom. 

Why is this important? What was the thought behind it? Why did we choose such an undertaking? 

10-15 years ago, people cared about social media with no thought to data privacy and security. We saw data misuse and abuse, and the endless drama of Senate hearings revealed how an average consumer has been manipulated to buy products and services. By no means, do I understate the benefits of data-driven tools we use today. I only focus on the abuse that we could have avoided. 

With the rapid digitalization of mobility, we will see more risk to our personal and private lives. Today, the risk to your data still sits on your device. Tomorrow is about every move you make outside your home. 

Like my good friend Roger Allen once described, we will all become the snails that leave the trail of where we have been at every point of life. 

And I know we can avoid that blunder if we truly commit to it today. 

I also make a case that the real disruption in mobility will be coming out of the cross-pollination of technologies that usually come from outside of the industry. 

Let's look at another example that happened in our lifetime. If you go back 10 years ago, you are likely to find yourself walking across the office to take a printout. 

And if you were in a printer manufacturing business then you’d be thinking about how to make faster and better printers to beat your competition. But someone thought outside the printer business and came up with e-signatures. 

You don’t need a home printer today as you did 10 or 15 years ago. If you go to the DocuSign website, you can see how many trees are being saved by avoiding paper. 

They focused on the user, not the printer.   

That's a great example of disruption by thinking outside the box. In Laureti’s case, thinking outside the car. We focus on the user, meaning passenger - not entirely on the car itself. 

In the beginning, when we met with several auto companies, I was surprised that they could not understand our proposition and why it was even relevant. They saw the car and the driver. That was all. They failed to understand who the actual user will be in the inevitably approaching future of mobility. 

Today we have partnerships with global software and hardware companies that understand what we do and coming forward to support our proposition. 

But this has not been the case for years.

We were a lone voice for many years in the wild. But today, we heard from global companies that they have dedicated teams on passenger-centric research investing millions into it. Companies like Apple, Google, Oppo, and Sony have nothing to do with cars but they have their own autonomous and electric vehicle programs. 

What do they understand that the traditional players don't? 

Is it possible that these companies may become the new face of the industry? 

The big question is what will be the new landscape for this industry. 

Allow me to put forward three predictions that the industry will have to deal with in the coming years. The advancements of autonomous technologies will initiate a monumental paradigm shift across all facets of the multi-modal trip chain., increasing the demand for human-centric mobility. When you look at global companies like Icona in this room, you can tell this is already happening now. 

Data safety and privacy issues, AI-driven on-demand models, and disruption caused by cross-pollinated inventions will be major challenges we will soon face. Industry will soon have to embrace the vision that the future user is not the driver, it is also the passenger. Companies that ignore this space will become prisoners of new disruption. A disruption that often comes from outside the industry.  

If my predictions are correct, in the upcoming years, some auto OEMs will not survive by solely operating as car manufacturers as they do today. To a great degree, if they want to stay relevant they will have to do more. 

Thank you for your attention and I am open to questions.