For the first time in nearly three decades, Ford Business Solutions (FBS) is expanding beyond Chennai with a new centre in Bengaluru. In this interview, Mike Amend, chief enterprise technology officer, Ford, tells Narayanan V about the expansion and workforce addition plans. Edited excerpts:
FBS has a 12,000 strong workforce in Chennai. What prompted a new centre in Bengaluru?
Bengaluru has a lot of talent with digital and e-commerce capabilities due to the presence of Big Tech and e-commerce companies like Flipkart, Target, Microsoft and Adobe. In Bengaluru, we will go after some niche skills like platform engineering, digital and e-commerce, DevOps, cybersecurity and other specialised roles.
FBS has a presence in Hungary, Romania and Mexico, but the Chennai centre in India is the largest and will continue to remain the hub for global operations. We will continue to expand and scale our Chennai campus. The Bengaluru office will complement this by focusing on niche skills.
Is your plan to hire 3,000 people in Chennai in three years on track?
That plan is well on track. In 2024, FBS Chennai added 1,050 employees, primarily in the enterprise technology (ET) division. We plan to hire another 2,000 people, especially in ET, over the next four years. It is the largest function and the biggest play now for Ford Motor Company. A lot of modernisation is happening inside Ford, including ERP, payroll and engineering systems. A lot of these works are being done here. Overall, about half of Ford’s Enterprise Tech employees globally are based in Chennai.
The Ford Credit team, which supports global financing and leasing operations, is another key team in Chennai. It has doubled in size over the past two years.
How is the talent availability for advanced skills like artificial intelligence?
Unfortunately, the demand for this talent outstrips the supply for everyone. There is only so much talent available when it comes to advanced skills like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). We just brought in a new leader on AI, and our new chief data, AI and analytics officer joined us a month ago. We are recruiting more and more people, but our fundamental premise is that we have to train. If we want to grow the number of people here, we need to train and develop them. It’s not just going to be pure recruitment because there simply aren’t enough people—not just for Ford, but for any company.
How is Ford addressing the talent gap?
One of the things that we are doing is around our AI advancement centre. We are training thousands of people here in Chennai and soon in our Bengaluru office as well. We have something called AI at Ford, which is basically to teach people not just in tech, but in many cases, non-technology people, how they can learn new skills around GenAI. We are also partnering with Google and Microsoft to train thousands of people to help them develop AI expertise. And as a matter of fact, I think we are even opening up some of this to non-Ford employees, allowing them to come on-site and learn how to advance their AI skills, even if they don’t work for Ford.
