On Automotive Cloud 9 ft. Achyut Jajoo of Salesforce

[00:00:00] My name is Carl Anthony and I work in the automotive industry in Detroit.

[00:00:07] Sometimes that work encompasses future vehicle technology and that's what we talk about here, for the most part anyway.

[00:00:14] This is AutoVision News Radio. connected car owners want, what would they be willing to pay a premium for? Second, if the execution and the communication around those services is exceptional, OEMs can have lasting and more meaningful customer relationships. And the word that came up during Broider's Automotive USA 2023 was absorb, meaning that

[00:01:41] OEMs who do this well have a chance to absorb consumers into their ecosystem, thereby creating and chief solutions officer for the manufacturing, automotive and energy verticals at Salesforce. Sometimes his colleagues say that a chute is a boomerang to Salesforce since he was away for a time and is now back again. During my time with a chute, I was grateful for his willingness to help me understand

[00:03:00] what is meant by the term automotive cloud

[00:03:03] and how it can be leveraged to address the trends we identified was on the computer and we would use it. Remember your Microsoft Word or other technologies, your email even was on the computer. Today people use Gmail and all these other technologies. And in the backend Gmail changes and you get new features and new functionality. In enterprise software, this was never done. In those early years, Mark Parker, Dave and Frank

[00:04:21] really embodied what we might classify now

[00:04:24] as the startup mentality.

[00:04:26] And it wasn't Cloud because the software was

[00:05:40] kind of furnished to a user through the customer. And over in automotive is also, as we all know, automotive companies don't directly sell. Although that's some of that is changing. We go through a vast dealer network. So there is that other nuance. How do you actually sell to an end consumer where you have this not a direct relationship,

[00:08:21] but like a relationship through the dealer network,

[00:08:24] which is now also changing in a different way.

[00:08:27] So how do you talk to that consumer? helps you do all of those business processes, sales, service, marketing, commerce, and on and on and on. In November 2023, Salesforce whole bunch of fleets of cars. So in automotive, typically the buyer, the end? Is it a car Anthony? Oh, is it car Anthony who actually pays for this, but his daughter drives this as part of that household. These things, if you understand them better, or they're the ones, then you can actually personalize your sales service marketing and

[00:12:21] all these other activities with that business entity or with that owner operator or with that

[00:13:22] is expanded in more effective communication. For example, let's say we have a Hawaiian-Blue sedan.

[00:13:26] Hawaiian-Blue is the color of the Detroit lion,

[00:13:28] so that's what we're gonna go with.

[00:13:30] But we've driven our Hawaiian-Blue sedan for a long while,

[00:13:34] and the miles have really started to add up.

[00:13:36] Just as we are about to cross the 100,000-mile threshold,

[00:13:40] the manufacturer of our Hawaiian-Blue sedan

[00:13:43] sends a message to our dealership letting them know.

[00:13:46] At this point, the dealership has more information Here we receive an email about the latest financing offers. While obviously if we've just had our Hawaiian Blue Sedan in for a comprehensive service, we don't plan on getting anything new. And we might think if we just had our Hawaiian Blue Sedan in for service, why in the world are they emailing us about new vehicles that are available?

[00:15:02] It's because the information on our Hawaiian Blue Sedan is not centralized. Again, this is the other thing called, like you might be an email person. I might be a text message person. I might be some other person. Like, how do you actually reach that customer in the right channel? Yes. Because the customer is in the driver's seat. Customer decides how they make their decisions to what to buy and who to hang on to as a kind

[00:16:21] of maintaining relationship.

[00:16:22] And this is essentially allowing this platform is allowing you as a owner of that customer services might be available for enthusiasts like me. This is the promise of software defined vehicles. So like there is, there are chips in the car, there are sensors in the car that are connected, and then based on software, I can change their, the ability for this car to do different things. When that is possible, I can essentially drive different experiences.

[00:17:42] So now call, if you're an off-roader,

[00:17:45] it's not as if you're off-roading every day, right? using mobile phones just to place phone calls. Yes, yes. I don't think we use a phone. Mobile phones today can place phone calls. So I have a lot of people who ask me, oh, I need my car only to drive from place A to place B. I asked them the same question. You used phone, mobile phones only to place calls. Are you using your mobile phone just to place calls?

[00:19:00] You're using it for a lot of things.

[00:19:02] It does place calls, but it does so many more things.

[00:19:04] Yes.

[00:19:05] I just want to use an used to having the internet in our high school library. But during those formative years, I loved trucks, and I started driving with my father in his Chevy Silverado in the summer of 1997 on my Iowa learners permit. And the relationship with my father is a complicated one.

[00:20:20] He was a college professor who valued academics.

[00:20:23] I was a poor student who loved video games.

[00:20:25] And let's just say that neither one of us the 1980s India. And 1980s of India was essentially a country which was socialist. Like now people think of India in a very different way in 2024. It's very, very different country. But when I was growing up, it was like we had access to believe it or not just two cars. And both the cars were

[00:21:41] built by government owned companies. And you basically were allocated vehicles. Luckily, that's mechanical engineering, obviously translates into automotive. I started my job here. I live in the Detroit area with my family. I started my job actually in the automotive industry here, designing trucks and cars. I think what was really fascinating about that experience was I actually saw in real time, this was the time in 1990s.

[00:23:01] And that's when we were in automotive industry was going through its own

[00:23:05] transition. start last 20 plus years I've spent in the software business really focusing on manufacturing and automotive and really I'm being very lucky this has given me an opportunity to think about software and the problems that I can solve for my automotive customers but then through these experiences of the last 20 plus years I have gone and met customers across the globe. I've been to mechanical engineering school, you have an MBA, you're working at automotive living in the Detroit area. Did you ever see that when you were a kid and you're driving for the first time? Did you ever think this is how it would end up and you'd be doing it for a living one day? I wish I wrote an essay which said that, you know what I'm saying? It said, look, oh, well,

[00:25:40] I'll grow up and I'll become something. I've been very, very fortunate, all to be honest.