GM’s new product chief Sterling Anderson eyes technology renaissance
GM Chief Product Officer Sterling Anderson during the automaker’s “GM Forward” event in New York City on October 22, 2025.
GM
DETROIT — General Motors’ The newest product and technology executive said he sees the Detroit automaker as a canvas. Something that can be edited, retouched, or even torn apart.
After serving as executive vice president and chief product officer for about six months, Sterling Anderson appears to be putting all three ideas into practice as he oversees the company’s broad product portfolio, from the tools themselves to the software that powers them.
Anderson leaving driverless car company Aurora Innovation The company he co-founded to join GM in June has quickly become the most influential product executive outside of GM Chairman Mark Reuss in more than 15 years.
He has authority to oversee the “end-to-end product lifecycle” of GM vehicles, including manufacturing engineering, battery, software and service product management and engineering teams, according to GM.
“My priority is to accelerate the pace of innovation. One of the ways to do that is to decouple the abstraction of software from hardware,” he told CNBC at a tech event in New York on October 22. “I think that’s what the role is about, to bring all of these pieces together into a unified approach to how we develop products going forward.”
Since then, the company’s acclaimed heads of software and AI have unexpectedly left the company after relatively short tenures. The main responsibilities for the vehicles are now Anderson’s responsibility.
GM attributed the sudden departures of Dave Richardson, senior vice president of software and services engineering, and Barak Turovsky, head of AI, to restructuring efforts.
General Motors President and CEO Mary Barra (from right to left), President Mark Reuss, Chief Product Officer Sterling Anderson and Senior Vice President of Software and Services Engineering Dave Richardson at “GM Forward” on Wednesday, Oct. 22, 2025, in New York.
GM
“We are strategically integrating AI capabilities directly into our business and product organizations, enabling faster innovation and more targeted solutions,” a GM spokesperson said in an emailed statement last week about Turovsky’s departure.
This is another indication of Anderson’s strategy. He previously told CNBC that for GM to be successful, software and product must be thought of as one and the same, not as separate entities as they have been in recent years.
Anderson said he spent the first months of his GM tenure in “listening mode,” immersing himself in the automaker’s operations.
“Five months of listening allowed me to really fine-tune and target how we were going to move forward—not just what we were going to innovate on, but how we were going to do it,” he said in the October interview.
As first reported by CNBC, a third executive will also be leaving soon, as Barış Çetinok, senior vice president of product management for software and services, is leaving the company effective December 12.
Unlike Richardson and Turovsky, the company did not attribute his departure to restructuring. Three sources familiar with the situation, who spoke anonymously because the discussion was private, told CNBC that Çetinok left to pursue another opportunity.
Cetinok, Richardson, and Turovsky either declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment on their separation. Cetinok and Richardson will join the GM in 2023, while Turovsky was hired in March.
‘Silicon Valley cowboy’
A former McKinsey & Co. Anderson, his advisor Tesla’s The executive said that before joining GM, he thought of the automaker as a comic caricature rather than a canvas on which he would help transform it into a modern masterpiece.
Anderson said CEO Mary Barra and Reuss, to whom she reports, helped dispel the “old-world automotive” caricature and her concerns about the automaker not supporting the efforts of its employees.
“I was really worried about this, wasn’t I? I’m a Silicon Valley cowboy coming to Detroit and, you know, ‘queuing’ on an innovation story with a team that I was worried wasn’t going to be received very well. I found it quite different than I expected,” Anderson said.
His appointment marks the automaker’s renewed focus on software-defined vehicles and autonomy. GM’s goal is to build an autonomous vehicle, he said, a year after the company spun off its majority-owned Cruise AV business after years of development and billions of dollars in capital.
New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin and General Motors Chairman and CEO Mary Barra speak onstage during the 2025 New York Times Dealbook Summit at Jazz at Lincoln Center on December 03, 2025 in New York City.
Michael M. Santiago | Getty Images News | Getty Images
“Be clear, we are developing an autonomous product,” he told CNBC. “It is an autonomous product that can be safe in safety-critical situations without causing any harm to humans.”
On Wednesday, Barra cited Anderson and the automaker’s past efforts in autonomous vehicles as reasons why GM is “well positioned” to enable autonomous highway driving in its vehicles starting in 2028.
“When we talk about artificial intelligence, autonomous driving is still one of the most important applications that I strongly believe in,” Barra said. New York Times DealBook Summitreaffirmed the automaker’s plans for a “personal autonomous vehicle” replacement for the Cruise robotaxi.
Anderson is considered a leading expert on vehicle autonomy. Before founding autonomous driving company Aurora, he led the team that delivered Tesla’s Model X program and its “Autopilot” advanced driver assistance system. Also developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology “Smart Copilot” semi-autonomous vehicle security system
Anderson, who has a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in robotics from MIT, said it took a few conversations before he left Aurora, which he thought was “going to die.”
He’s not the only one who changed his mind; but many did not last long with the automaker. Other current and former Silicon Valley executives have expressed similar optimism about GM and its longtime CEO and chairman; Both have spent their entire careers as “GM lifeguards” at the automaker.
Richardson had previously praised working for Barra, whom he reported to Anderson before, as the “opportunity of a lifetime”. Çetinok previously described his position as “a product person’s dream” in an interview with CNBC.
Jens Peter “JP” Clausen, who led Tesla’s manufacturing expansion and worked at Lego and Google, cited “the opportunity to work for a leader like Barra” as a reason for joining GM as head of manufacturing in part, before his unexpected departure just a year later.
The accolades went both ways. When was Anderson’s appointment with GM? Announced in MayBarra and Reuss praised Anderson as being equipped to “evolve” and “reinvent” the automaker’s operations.
In addition to Anderson’s new product unit, Reuss continues to oversee the automaker’s production, design, marketing and sales, among other operations.
technology managers
The global automotive industry has struggled for years to better integrate technology into vehicles, from manufacturing to consumer-facing software to remote or “over-the-air” updates, as pioneered by Tesla.
GM has taken an aggressive approach to technology, hiring leaders from companies like Tesla and others. Apple And Google. But most of the time, these executives’ tenure at the company has been short-lived, such as the three most recent separations.
“[Traditional U.S. automakers] They had significant difficulty understanding software and electronics technology, which resulted in them having a parade of experts ‘coming in to help,'” said Peter Abowd, an engineer and automotive and technology consultant.
Abowd, managing director of engineering excellence at consulting firm Envorso, attributed executive turnover to “misapplication of skill and talent,” unrealistic expectations and excessive responsibilities in a company as large as GM and in an industry as complex as the automotive world.
“It’s a little bit like setting one up for failure,” Abowd said. “You can’t change an organization culturally in a few years…so the best thing to do is to part ways.”
That kind of turnover has led automakers like GM to regularly branch out in different directions, including in-car technologies, electric vehicle batteries, and other areas of the automotive industry that aren’t traditionally “core.”
Barra, GM’s longest-serving CEO since the company’s founder, is known for hiring executives based on the company’s top priorities at opportune times, and those priorities now appear to largely fall under Anderson’s management.
According to Anderson, GM is “really good at a lot of things” that are invisible to those outside the company. He said he believes combining his experience with fast-moving companies like Tesla and Aurora and GM’s “massive machine” and resources will better position the automaker for the future.
“I see it as a canvas,” Anderson said. “This is a tremendous opportunity for innovation, and I would be remiss to ignore what I can do to make it happen.”
