But finding all the necessary people to execute this vision has proved difficult amid a global labor shortage, particularly in high-tech jobs in software engineering and data analytics.
Mansuetti said Bosch has been forced to get creative to find the right people to become a more digital company. Bosch is retraining its work force and has graduated its first “IoT apprentice” class, which he said included a banker and a cook — both now prepared for auto industry duty.
“The German model of apprenticeship is in our blood,” he said. The company’s challenge is “finding the people with the aptitude, and then training them in what we need to do, and then reskilling and upskilling all of our folks. We have very talented mechanical engineers that develop very high-precision mechanical devices.”
Rueckert said the company already has provided AI training for about 21,500 of Bosch’s employees, with the goal of reaching 30,000. She said Bosch is also pairing many of its experienced hardware experts with newer employees who work in the digital space to help them become comfortable with software.
“The more success stories you have, the easier it is,” she said.
Bosch, which has around 400,000 employees globally, sees partnerships playing an important role as it looks to build its capabilities in software and connectivity. In late January, Bosch and Volkswagen’s software unit Cariad entered into an agreement to develop advanced driver-assistance systems for consumer vehicles. About 1,000 people from both companies will work on the project, and Bosch said it will also need to hire employees.
Bosch also is restructuring internally, to a degree. In December, the company said it will pool the development and sales of vehicle software, middleware, cloud services and development tools for its “application-independent software” under its subsidiary ETAS, starting in mid-2022.
Bosch equates “application-independent software” in a vehicle to iOS or Android operating systems on a cellphone.
Consolidating software development under one roof will allow the company to “achieve the speed, scale and security that the industry needs to continue its evolution and implement a new way of software development,” Eric Cesa, ETAS Americas general manager, said at CES. “Complexity is only going to grow as the industry looks toward a software-defined vehicle.”
Mansuetti said much of what Bosch is doing, including with ETAS, is designed to make the large company more nimble and make it easier for software developers, engineers and others to navigate.
“This is all a part of going from a product to a software company,” he said.
Bailo said that as the industry continues to become more automated and connected, it will be important for legacy companies such as Bosch and the automakers it supplies to be more nimble. Customers will expect their vehicle to be updated via software as quickly as their cellphones are. And that is a change that will completely disrupt traditional product development cycles, forcing companies into a “whole different way of thinking” and hiring, she said.
“To change a company’s culture and change the development process is extremely difficult to do,” she said. “It’s really difficult to take people out of what they’re comfortable doing.”
Jamie Butters contributed to this report.
