AI-powered autonomous driving technology takes centre-stage at India AI Impact Expo

New Delhi: At the India AI Impact Expo 2026, one can experience autonomous driving, as the Tata Group showcased its AI-powered autonomous driving technology. With multiple AI agents, including Voice AI, the technology can facilitate radar-based navigation in fog and user-approved overtakes.

Sreenivasa Chakravarti, Vice-President and Global Head — IoT and Digital Engineering, Tata Consultancy Services, told DH that the demo was attempting to bring to life how the real world translates into the virtual AI world.

Automation occurs when introducing automatic capability, but autonomous does not require the human. When we say autonomous car, we refer to the ultimate version, where it is driverless, he said.

In reality, however, is it possible to be driverless? “It’s a dream,” Chakravarti said, adding that as the journey towards autonomous driving progresses, there are a lot of things that come in the way.

In the case of personalisation, one can add settings and features accordingly. One may invoke some driving capability, for instance, driver assist safety or neighbouring car collision detection.

“All these features are available today, and many of the new generation cars are already bringing them out. The features will come to life depending on what you are dealing with — entry-level, mid-market, or a luxury car,” he said.

Referring to the AI-powered autonomous driving technology that was on display, he said it is primarily built up on an NVIDIA stack, using all the latest chip capabilities that are available. “All of these have been built by our teams, and they have been deployed into the vehicle. For example, it can reverse, parallel park and can identify a parking slot for itself. If you enter a destination, it can identify and take that route,” he explained.

These capabilities are now available for OEMs. Speaking on the future of technology, Chakravarti said that they anticipate public infrastructure across the globe will start moving towards 6G, which is the upcoming sixth-generation cellular technology.

What is the advantage of 6G? “For any of the capabilities you deploy, you need a very rapid response. You cannot wait for one. It’s a millisecond, microsecond kind of a response. 6G brings in those kinds of capabilities and we do expect a lot of these to become commercially viable in the next couple of years. Once that happens, one will certainly see a scaled adoption of many of the features, and that could be a big game changer,” he added.