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During CES, John Reed from Microsoft,Mukund Ghangurde from Accenture and Timothy Brogan from Wejo joined for a live recording of the .metaverse podcast. As prominent leaders in the automotive industry, they discussed how their robust partner network is the key to driving the digital transformation necessary to create better experiences and more time-to-value for their customers.
John Reed is Solutions Leader, Automotive, Mobility & Transportation Industry at Microsoft. John has worked at Microsoft on their automotive team for over 5 years and is an active author on Microsoft’s Automotive Industry Blog. His latest articles can be read here.
Mukund Ghangurde is Managing Director of the North America AMBG Industry X Business at Accenture. Mukund previously worked at Microsoft for over a decade where he was focused on driving transformation across automotive markets.
Timothy Brogan is VP of Sales - Fleet at Wejo. Prior to Wejo, Timothy worked at AssureNet for over ten years, an InsurTech platform for advanced fleet management that he co-founded.
To listen to the full conversation, find the .metaverse podcast on any podcast streaming network, including Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Read the full transcript of this episode below.
Ziv Navoth
Hi, I'm Ziv Navoth and welcome to the .metaverse podcast. Today's episode is one of a series of fireside chats recorded live at CES 2023 surrounding how the metaverse is revolutionizing the automotive industry and the customer buying journey. In these conversations, we'll hear from a variety of leaders from Microsoft, Accenture, Fiat, Tekion, CNH Industrial, Wejo, PwC and ZF.
John Reed
I'm John Reed with Microsoft. I'm responsible for Microsoft Solutions and Automotive Mobility and Transportation, which include vehicle platforms, mobility services, factory supply chain, and customer experience. I'm here today with Tim from Wejo and Mukund from Accenture. Tim, quick introduction from yourself.
Tim Brogan
Sure. Thank you John. Tim Brogan, Vice President of Sales for Fleet at Wejo. We're connected to our company. We aggregate data from multiple OEMs by the millions and, homogenize and anonymize it and package it up. And I'm on the Fleet side, which is more about the VIN specific collection of data and I’m sure we're gonna dig into that a little bit more in a few minutes.
John Reed
Absolutely.
Mukund Ghangurde
Hi, I'm Mukund, I'm a managing director within our Accenture, Microsoft Business Group, and I'm responsible for the North America Industry X Business within AMBG. As Accenture, we're one of Microsoft's largest system integration and consulting partners, and we help clients on a global basis drive digital transformation.
Particularly in the automotive mobility and transportation space here at CES.
John Reed
Fantastic. Well, first overall, we're here at CES. We're seeing sort of the future of automotive mobility and transportation. Perhaps we could talk first about, from a Wejo perspective, what's Wejo’s role in the transformation of automotive? What are you guys investing in? What's your focus for the future?
“We're pulling 10 times the number of attributes directly from the OEM data on that vehicle and aggregating it regardless of the OEM.” - Tim Brogan
Tim Brogan
With regard to Fleet specifically, we are creating a universal API, which we call Wejo Fleet Access or Access Fleet. And we are pulling data off of vehicles directly as opposed to where traditionally a third party piece of hardware would do that job, whether it's a dongel or a black box. We're pulling 10 times the number of attributes directly from the OEM data on that vehicle and aggregating it regardless of the OEM. Putting it into a standard API where we can then disseminate that to companies like telematic service providers, who then can in turn take those additional data sets and create a myriad more features and products that help their Fleets run more officially.
John Reed
That's fantastic. Very exciting. Mukund, Accenture, we've been working together for decades. What sort of is Accenture's focus around automotive and the transformation into mobility?
Mukund Ghangurde
There's so much activity going on in this space. We're working with a lot of customers in terms of implementing the connected vehicle strategy, driving autonomous, driving sharing platforms. Particularly at CES here what we're doing is showcasing our fleet management platform, which we're really using with enterprise clients to allow them to drive more sustainable benefits out of their fleet, to drive lower costs, and to create better customer experiences.
John Reed
Fantastic. As you mentioned, as Microsoft, we see in the future transformation to mobility service, there are critical aspects of a platform - a data platform, for example, a need to create, an integrated set of connected fleet services, all of which are part of a set of building blocks in order to create the kind of mobility services that will power that transformation.
We recently introduced a set of reference architectures for autonomy, for connected fleet, as well as for digital selling. And in the connected fleet area as part of the work that we've been doing together, I understand that Wejo and Accenture are working very closely together. Perhaps starting with you, Tim, you could talk a little bit about your relationship with Accenture and what you guys are doing together.
Tim Brogan
Sure. We work with Accenture in multiple areas. Specifically right now, they're in a position to take advantage of this universal API. Look at all these different data attributes that are now available to them, where previously you were looking at deriving them from those third party.
We're very excited about it. It's going very well so far, and looking forward to the partnership growing.
John Reed
Excellent. Mukund, your perspective on Wejo and the work you guys are doing together?
Mukund Ghangurde
Yeah, Wejo is doing a fantastic job in terms of aggregating data from a variety of different data sources. And as you know, the problem in the industry has been there's so much fragmentation and data sources and also data formats, and so what Wejo is doing is fantastic and we're able to take the data that Wejo has - bring that into our platform in a much more sort of unified way, I would say. And what that does is it allows us to accelerate the time-to-value that we can deliver for our customers in terms of the benefits that I talked about in terms of sustainability costs and better experiences.
“(Wejo) allows us to accelerate the time-to-value that we can deliver for our customers.” - Mukund Ghangurde
John Reed
Fantastic. And that's a great point, particularly with some of the headwinds we're seeing with the economy. It's very important for us to be able to help our customers deploy and accelerate time-to-value. On behalf of Microsoft, our automotive mobility and transportation team, I wanted to thank you both.
Microsoft is 100% partner focused. We've got great relationships with you both. Appreciate your partnership with us as well as your partnership together driving the future of transportation.
Tim Brogan
Yeah, thank you John, all. I'm excited and looking forward to big things.
Mukund Ghangurde
Thank you, John. Excited about the partnership and what we can do moving ahead.
To learn more about the metaverse, tune into the .metaverse podcast.
You can listen to the .metaverse podcast on all podcast platforms, including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Anchor.
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