Ford Hires Former Apple VP to Oversee New Customer Experience Effort

Ford Motor has named former Apple executive Peter Stern as president of a new business unit spearheading the automaker’s customer experience strategy across its software, hardware and online products. 

The Dearborn, Mich.-based company said Stern will build and lead a team at the newly formed Ford Integrated Services unit, which will be tasked with bringing together hardware, software and services over three units: the combustion engine-focused Ford Blue, the electric Model E, and Ford Pro, the company’s commercial fleet offering.

Stern’s unit will also lead services marketing at the company, oversee the automaker’s Ford Next venture studio and manage some “out-of-vehicle” customer experiences, the company said. Ford classifies out-of-vehicle experiences as software and services that go beyond operating a vehicle—for instance, using a car’s cameras to recognize a bear while the driver is asleep when camping, a company spokesman said. 

The news comes as more automakers reorganize to become technology service providers in the electric era.

“Everyone is so focused on the EV transformation,” Ford Chief Executive Jim Farley said on a call with reporters, “but I keep saying the biggest change in our industry is to go to a digital product and physical services.”

Car companies for decades peddled vehicles designed for smooth and powerful drives. Now they’re automating services such as breakdown recovery, designing dashboard displays that resemble the user interface on laptop screens and offering subscriptions to features such as heated seats. 

Ford said Monday that it has more than 550,000 paying subscribers to its software and services, although Farley noted the company isn’t charging for heated seats or similar, once-standard items.

“Our industry is littered with bad choices about subscription services, and that is not the direction we’re going in,” he said.

Car companies at the same time are reconfiguring showrooms and bolstering their websites to sell more cars online.

Some have named customer or user experience leaders to handle the complexities of designing, marketing and managing multiple customer touchpoints outside of dealerships and auto shops. General Motors in early 2021 hired financial services company Mastercard’s Donald Chesnut as its chief experience officer, and Volkswagen

Ferrari a few months later said it had inked a multiyear deal with LoveFrom, the design studio owned by former Apple design chief Jony Ive, as it readied for its own foray into electric vehicles.

Ford, meanwhile, hired Apple product design leader Doug Field as its chief advanced technology and embedded systems officer in September 2021. Now the company’s chief advanced product development and technology officer, Field will work alongside his fellow Apple alumni Stern, Stern said on the call with Farley.

Stern had been vice president of services at Apple, and oversaw Apple TV+, iCloud, Apple News+, Apple Books and Apple Arcade, as well as its ad and cloud services. He was previously executive vice president and chief product, people and strategy officer at cable company Time Warner Cable.

—Ben Glickman contributed to this article.

Write to Katie Deighton at [email protected]