The AI and Automotive Integration Forum at the 2026 Convergent Intelligence Industry Development Conference was held in Wuhan's Optics Valley on September 9. Co-hosted by the Convergent Intelligence Industry Innovation Center and Hubei Science & Technology Investment Group, the conference focused on “building an innovative, open, and integrated convergent intelligence ecosystem.” It was described as China's first intelligence industry event to connect participants across industries, fields, and countries since the goal of “creating new forms of an intelligent economy” was first included in a government work report.
JDO founder and CEO Yifei Wang was invited to speak. In a presentation titled “How Cockpit Agents Can Drive Greater User Engagement,” he shared JDO's thinking and experience in cockpit agents.
Understanding the User Comes First
“Greater engagement means moving from a first experience that feels useful to a service people want to use again, and then to meeting more travel and everyday needs continuously within the cockpit,” Wang said at the outset.
In his view, a car differs from other smart devices. It has qualities of both a home and a personal space, making the cockpit a relatively private setting. Travel history, interaction records, and even a driver's in-car preferences accumulate there. The central value of a cockpit Agent, he argued, is not simply what it can do, but whether it can understand the user and then complete a task on the user's behalf.
“If you say, ‘I want to go somewhere nearby,’ the answer should differ for one person or a family, on a workday or a holiday,” Wang said. He described context, timing, and action as three dimensions that require an Agent to draw on the vehicle owner's history and preferences to offer a personalized response.
From a Spoken Request to a Completed Task
Wang noted that in-car interactions have often involved several rounds of back-and-forth, sometimes without a useful result. In the Agent era, the key is to turn conversation into end-to-end task completion.
“The task is not just to find you a coffee shop. It is to find one, place the order, claim a coupon, and tell you when the coffee will be ready,” he said. Only when the whole task is completed, he argued, will users have a reason to keep using the service.
Supporting this approach are JDO's independently developed Canghai large AI model, multimodal cockpit algorithms, AIOS, AI Agent, and AI Cloud. In an energy replenishment use case, a main Agent coordinates destination and time constraints while specialized Agents for charging, refueling, and navigation work together to identify and carry out an option that saves time and effort and offers value to the user.
Capabilities in Use, with Further Potential
Wang cited figures to illustrate JDO's deployment to date: its services bring together more than 60% of China's gas stations—nearly 80,000 locations—and millions of charging points as a foundation for energy replenishment. On April 2 this year, JDO demonstrated an in-vehicle Agent experience at a China UnionPay event. Using UnionPay's APOP framework for payment identity authentication, the demonstration brought a secure, seamless cockpit payment experience for ordering coffee or food delivery into the vehicle. Wang said it had received broad recognition from automakers and industry partners.
Founded in 2014, JDO has worked in automotive cockpit AI and digital technology for more than a decade. It has served more than 30 automakers, including Audi, BMW, Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen, Bentley, JLR, Toyota, Honda, Nissan, FAW, GAC, and Xiaomi, and its products have been deployed in over 14 million production vehicles. Research and development staff account for 70% of the company. JDO is recognized as a national high-tech enterprise, a Shanghai-based specialized and innovative enterprise, and a Shanghai Science and Technology Little Giant enterprise.
Wang closed with the central question: “Whether cockpit Agents become a way to deepen engagement ultimately depends on whether users are willing to entrust their next task to them.”
That is the question JDO continues to address. Guided by its mission—“Make Cars Smarter, Make Users Joyful！”—JDO plans to deepen its work in intelligent cockpits and in-vehicle AI. With automakers and ecosystem partners, it aims to make understanding needs, organizing tasks, and delivering services reusable capabilities, so that the value of intelligence is realized throughout each journey.