Vice President and Head of Product Management, Aeris Automotive
I have spent my career working on the technologies that bring vehicles to life, from in-vehicle electronics and software to the cloud platforms that connect them. Few moments have felt as exciting as this one.
The automotive industry is undergoing a fundamental transformation toward software-defined vehicles (SDV). Increasingly, artificial intelligence is extending that vision toward AI-defined vehicles (AIDV), with experiences that can become more adaptive, contextual, and personalized over time.
For me, this transformation brings together two worlds I have worked in for decades: the vehicle and the cloud. For Aeris, it creates an opportunity to help automotive manufacturers connect those worlds into a coherent architecture and turn that architecture into a better customer experience.
One question keeps coming back to me: Why should your digital experience start over every time you step into a different vehicle?
Automotive manufacturers are exceptional at building cars. They continue to introduce impressive capabilities that improve comfort, convenience, safety, and driving enjoyment. Yet the experience surrounding those features often remains tied to an individual vehicle.
Move from your own car to another vehicle within the same brand, and familiar preferences, services, and settings may not follow. Customers encounter sophisticated products, but the continuity between those products is still developing.
The smartphone industry offers a useful lesson. Within a digital ecosystem, people expect their preferences, applications, and services to follow them across supported devices. That continuity has become central to how those ecosystems are designed.
Automotive manufacturers have an opportunity to bring the same thinking to their own brands.
Imagine leasing a new vehicle and finding your familiar digital environment waiting for you. Or renting a vehicle from the same brand while traveling and accessing the services and preferences you already use. The experience would adapt to the vehicle’s capabilities while retaining the familiarity that makes it yours.
That gives customers another reason to stay with a brand. Alongside design, quality, and driving performance, they gain an ecosystem they value every time they use it. Buying, leasing, or renting another vehicle within that ecosystem becomes a more natural choice.
Delivering that continuity requires a change in how automotive software is architected.
Many OEMs already have important pieces: connected services, customer accounts, mobile applications, cloud platforms, and increasingly capable vehicle computing. But those components have often evolved separately. Vehicle architecture and cloud architecture have been developed by different teams, around different priorities.
An experience that follows the customer needs those systems to work together.
The cloud must become an extension of the vehicle architecture, providing a common foundation for orchestrating identity, preferences, services, and software capabilities across compatible vehicles. Each vehicle then delivers the appropriate experience for its hardware, software, and operating context, with safety-critical execution remaining under the appropriate onboard controls.
This is where the distinction between being connected and being synchronized becomes essential.
Connectivity allows a vehicle to exchange information with the cloud. Synchronization helps the vehicle and cloud maintain a consistent understanding of the states that matter: which services are active, which configurations apply, which software is running, and which preferences belong to an authorized user.
That shared understanding makes it possible to build services around the customer’s relationship with the brand across multiple vehicles.
At Aeris, we have spent many years helping automotive manufacturers develop and operate connected vehicle services. Five major automotive customers trust Aeris as a connected vehicle platform partner today. That experience has given us a practical understanding of the complexity involved in connecting vehicles at scale, and the importance of bridging automotive engineering with cloud operations. And there’s a lot of work to do still.
According to Omdia’s 2026 SDV Survey, 80% of the most essential SDV enablers aren’t even deployed yet, and the key scaling barrier remains integration and legacy systems. To address this, we’re building on our connected vehicle foundation to transform the way automakers manage and scale its value and capability across the business.
The opportunity to build this at Aeris excites me personally. My work in in-vehicle ECU development taught me how much care goes into making automotive systems work reliably. My experience in cloud development has shown me how shared platforms can accelerate innovation and extend services across an ecosystem.
Bringing those perspectives together is central to what we are building at Aeris.
OEMs should be able to focus their expertise on the vehicles, features, and experiences that distinguish their brands. A common digital backbone can help them connect those strengths across the customer’s journey, while supporting emerging AI-assisted capabilities throughout the business.
In January, we will be lifting the hood on a whole new way to unify, orchestrate, and scale the potential value of the connected vehicle across the modern automotive business. If you’re an automotive OEM and want to be one of the first to see the future of the connected vehicle in action, contact us for a private demonstration at CES 2027.
