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SPOTLIGHT REPORTS

RTC Spotlights are designed to go beyond technology demonstrations, marketing messages, and polished success stories.

They create a trusted environment where practitioners, researchers, innovators, and decision-makers can engage in honest conversations about what is actually happening inside their organizations—what works, what doesn’t, what remains difficult, and what still needs to change.

The objective is not simply to showcase innovation, but to better understand the organizational, operational, and business challenges surrounding its adoption.

Each Spotlight Report captures the most important discussions, key takeaways, and lessons learned from these conversations.

Available Reports:

RTC Automotive Meetup @ XR Expo Stuttgart 2026

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Executive Report
April 28, 2026 | Messe Stuttgart

About the Meetup

The RTC Automotive Meetup took place on April 28, 2026, during XR Expo 2026 at Messe Stuttgart. XR Expo brought together the professional virtual, mixed, and augmented reality community in Stuttgart on April 28–29.

Organized through the RTC Automotive Special Interest Group, the meetup welcomed approximately 50 participants, including representatives from Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, Audi, Bosch, MHP – A Porsche Company, Accenture Song, technology providers, startups, academic institutions, and XR specialists.

The afternoon began with an XR Expo Automotive Tour, followed by a series of short presentations examining practical uses of XR and AI across automotive training, industrial quality assurance, regional innovation, vehicle development, and agentic systems.

Featured Presentations

XR in Automotive Training: Lessons from the Paint Shop Floor

Vitek Goyel
Managing Director and Founder, Kompetek Interaktiv GmbH

A real-world case study of PixelSpray VR in automotive paint shops, exploring how immersive training can improve skills development, reduce costly errors, and progress from pilot projects toward operational deployment.


From Vision to Industry Standard: Scaling AR for Industrial Quality Assurance

Kemal Gider
Sales Director, CDM Tech GmbH

The journey of transforming a model-based augmented reality inspection concept into a solution deployed across industrial manufacturing and quality-assurance environments.

A-MoVer Project: Automotive Innovation That Reshapes a Region

Prof. Arsénio Reis
Universidade de Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro

An ecosystem-oriented initiative connecting research and industry—from an electric vehicle equipped with intelligent antennas to an industrial XR onboarding platform—with applications across automotive production and defense. 

From Passive Tool to Autonomous Co-Pilot: AI Agents as a New Interface in Spatial Computing

Michael Aechtler
CEO and Founder, Gamechangerz

An examination of the convergence between extended reality and agentic AI, and the emergence of context-aware “spatial co-pilots” supporting vehicle design, test generation, predictive maintenance, and increasingly autonomous industrial workflows.

 

Panel Discussion

The presentations were followed by:

Moving Beyond the Hype — From AI Integration to Business Reinvention: Scaling XR & AI in Automotive

Panelists

Moderated by

Rather than concentrating on individual products, the panel addressed three broader questions:

  • Where are XR and AI already delivering value in production, and where do they remain confined to proofs of concept? 
  • What is really preventing adoption: technology, organizational structures, mindset, governance, or business models? 
  • Are XR and AI simply improving existing workflows, or are they forcing automotive organizations to rethink how they operate? 

Introduction to the Panel

The RTC Automotive Meetup, held during XR Expo Stuttgart, brought together approximately 50 senior professionals from across the automotive XR and AI ecosystem, including representatives from Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, Audi, Bosch, MHP – A Porsche Company, Accenture Song, technology startups, research organizations, and XR solution providers.

Rather than focusing on technology demonstrations, the discussion explored a more fundamental question:

What is preventing XR and AI from moving beyond successful pilots into organization-wide business transformation?

The conversation quickly shifted away from hardware and software capabilities toward organizational structures, governance, trust, procurement, leadership, and business reinvention—themes that strongly echo the objectives of RESET London 26.

Panel Participants

Panelists

Moderated by

Executive Summary

The discussion confirmed that XR and AI have reached a level of maturity where technology is no longer the principal obstacle to adoption.

Instead, organizations are increasingly constrained by fragmented data environments, organizational silos, procurement processes, governance, cybersecurity, internal politics, and the difficulty of moving successful innovations into production.

Perhaps the strongest consensus of the afternoon was that the challenge has shifted from technology integration to business transformation.

1. XR and AI are finally reaching production

Participants agreed that XR and AI have moved well beyond experimentation in several domains.

Significant progress is already visible in:

  • Engineering 
  • Vehicle design 
  • Simulation 
  • Human-machine interface development 
  • Quality assurance 
  • Manufacturing training 
  • Collaborative design reviews 
  • Visualization 

Several companies reported measurable reductions in physical prototypes, shorter iteration cycles, earlier design validation, and improved collaboration across distributed teams.

By contrast, customer-facing applications, dealership experiences, and marketing workflows remain at a much earlier stage of adoption.

2. Technology is no longer the bottleneck

One of the clearest conclusions from the panel was that technical capability is no longer the primary challenge.

The obstacles have become organizational.

Participants repeatedly pointed to:

  • Organizational silos 
  • Internal politics 
  • Procurement processes 
  • Budget ownership 
  • Risk aversion 
  • Legal and compliance concerns 
  • Cybersecurity requirements 
  • Lack of executive sponsorship 
  • Limited trust between departments 

Many organizations possess the necessary technology today but struggle to integrate it into existing operating models.

3. Data has become the strategic battlefield

Virtually every participant highlighted the importance of data.

Engineering, design, simulation, UX, visualization, manufacturing, and product configuration frequently rely on separate software stacks and independent data pipelines.

Even teams working on the same vehicle often operate in parallel with limited interoperability until very late in the development process.

Several participants argued that unified data environments and interoperable workflows will become prerequisites for successfully scaling both XR and AI.

Without this foundation, organizations risk reinforcing existing silos rather than eliminating them. 

4. Proofs of Concept (POCs) are easy. Scaling is hard.

The panel repeatedly returned to the same pattern.

Organizations successfully build innovative Proofs of Concept.

The demonstrations work.

Everyone agrees they show promise.

Yet many never reach production.

Participants identified several recurring causes:

  • No clear production owner 
  • No operational budget 
  • Procurement delays 
  • Security concerns 
  • Organizational resistance 
  • Difficulty transferring responsibility from innovation teams to production teams 

One participant estimated that roughly 80% of XR Proofs of Concept never progress into regular operational use, despite technical success.

The consensus was that successful pilots must be designed from the outset with a clear pathway toward production. 

5. Faster development does not automatically produce better innovation

Generative AI is dramatically reducing software development time.

Applications that previously required months can increasingly be developed in days or weeks.

This opens tremendous opportunities for startups, small teams, and highly specialized solutions.

However, participants also warned of an unintended consequence.

As software becomes easier to build, organizations risk creating dozens of isolated internal solutions that duplicate existing work, increase technical debt, complicate governance, and further fragment enterprise architectures.

Rapid development must therefore be accompanied by stronger coordination and governance.

6. Trust matters as much as ROI

A particularly interesting discussion focused on trust.

Contrary to common assumptions, participants argued that Return on Investment alone rarely drives adoption.

Organizations also need confidence that:

  • Technology suppliers will remain viable 
  • Solutions can be supported long-term 
  • Data remains secure 
  • Governance requirements are respected 
  • Internal teams trust one another’s work 
  • Companies will not become overly dependent on proprietary vendors 

Technical excellence alone is insufficient.

Trust has become a strategic requirement.

7. The cost of inaction deserves as much attention as ROI

One important contribution emphasized that organizations should not only calculate the Return on Investment of adopting new technologies.

They should also quantify the financial consequences of not adopting them.

These include:

  • Lost competitiveness 
  • Missed business opportunities 
  • Slower innovation 
  • Delayed organizational learning 
  • Increased strategic risk 

Several participants argued that, in rapidly evolving markets, the cost of waiting may soon exceed the cost of experimentation.

8. Large organizations need better bridges between innovation and production

The discussion highlighted the disconnect between research, innovation, engineering, operations, and production.

One useful framework distinguished between:

  • Pioneers, who explore new ideas. 
  • Settlers, who transform ideas into reliable products. 
  • Town Planners, who industrialize and scale successful systems. 

Most organizations contain these capabilities.

Far fewer successfully connect them.

Participants emphasized the growing importance of “bridge builders” capable of translating between innovation teams, operational departments, finance, procurement, security, and executive leadership. 

9. New collaboration models are emerging

Traditional supplier relationships may no longer be sufficient.

The panel discussed alternative approaches including:

  • Venture Client models 
  • Cost-sharing across multiple customers 
  • Federated development 
  • Federated learning 
  • Strategic startup partnerships 

These models allow startups to retain their agility while enabling large organizations to access innovation more rapidly and with lower risk.

10. Innovation cultures differ across regions

Participants also reflected on differences between geographic markets.

Several observed that obtaining approval for innovation projects often takes considerably longer in Europe—particularly Germany—than in the United States or parts of Asia.

While these observations were anecdotal rather than statistical, they reinforced a broader concern:

Organizations waiting for certainty before acting may ultimately place themselves at a competitive disadvantage.

Why this discussion matters

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the conversation was how naturally it evolved beyond XR and AI themselves.

The discussion increasingly focused on:

  • Leadership 
  • Organizational transformation 
  • Business models 
  • Governance 
  • Cross-functional collaboration 
  • Operational reinvention 
  • Executive decision-making 

In other words, the conversation became less about adopting technology and more about reinventing organizations.

These are precisely the questions that RESET London 26 has been designed to address through small, invitation-only, cross-industry discussions bringing together executives, innovators, technologists, and decision-makers facing similar challenges. 

Key Takeaways

  • XR and AI are becoming production-ready, particularly in engineering and design. 
  • Technology is evolving faster than organizational structures. 
  • Data interoperability has become strategic infrastructure. 
  • Organizational silos remain one of the biggest barriers to scaling innovation. 
  • Proofs of Concept require clearly defined pathways toward production. 
  • Trust matters as much as technical performance and ROI. 
  • Organizations should evaluate the financial cost of inaction alongside traditional ROI. 
  • Large companies need stronger bridges between innovation, engineering, operations, and executive leadership. 
  • New collaboration models between startups and enterprises are emerging. 
  • The next phase of XR and AI adoption is fundamentally about business reinvention, not simply technology deployment. 

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