When it comes to speed and the auto industry, the real acceleration is happening behind-the-scenes—from on-board computers that connect the moving parts on the inside, to 5G-enabled connectivity that allows them to interact with the cities, people and cars around them. At Toyota, the teams of technologists responsible for enhancing mobility are prioritizing the needs of the customer, balancing data privacy and human-centric travel, to deliver hyper-connected everyday experiences.
In this episode of The Restless Ones, we’ll sit with one of the most forward-thinking technologists at the intersection of mobility and data, Zack Hicks of Toyota, who not only leads the connected technology group for Toyota, but is also CEO of their data startup, Toyota Connected. We’ll hear how his vision for mobility, making the world a better place, comes to life by unleashing the talent in his organization.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
We are looking at five G because we do see
opportunities for improved safety, reducing traffic congestion, and delivering rich
media experiences in the vehicle, not just for the driver
but for the passengers. So those experiences should just flow
naturally and should be enabled, and five G is going
to be a great opportunity to do that in a
much more meaningqual way. Welcome to the Restless Ones, where
(00:26):
we speak with the leaders who push the envelope when
it comes to technological innovations and solutions, leaders who don't
follow standards they set them. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
Our guest today is Zach Hicks of Toyota, North America.
He has worked in several capacities at Toyota, eventually occupying
the role of ce IO. As ce IO, he received
(00:49):
numerous awards and accolades, but he didn't stop there. Zack
found himself tackling challenges and taking opportunities that don't fall
neatly into the c I O bucket. Zach, thank you
so much for joining us on the Restless Ones. It's
(01:09):
a real pleasure to be able to sit down and
have a conversation with you. Thanks Jonathan, I appreciate the opportunity.
Before we jump into your background, one thing I would
love to do is just hear from you what you're
full official title is, because I think that just me
saying it might take up an entire episode. It sounds
(01:31):
like a lot. But they're all very closely related, you know.
So in in North America, I'm the Chief Digital Officer.
I'm responsible for digital transformation and mobility. In those functions,
I have traditional I T Corporate I T for sales
and manufacturing and all of the functions within Toyota and
North America. I'm also responsible for our Connected Technologies, which
(01:52):
is our in vehicle, the hardware and software and the
multimedia units in the vehicle. UM. I also have a
mobility the group, and that's kind of how we look
at mobility in the future, rideshare, car share and new
ways of operating. And then almost five years ago, we
launched a big data a I M L company called
toy To Connected and for that I'm the CEO. So
(02:15):
I spend a lot of time bouncing back and forth
between the two roles, but they're very interrelated, so it's
not like to managing two completely separate jobs. There's a
lot of overlap there, and I do have a role
within our parent company in Japan. As a Japanese title
of combo shoku just means management executive management over mobility.
I love your humility and modesty because from my perspective,
(02:38):
I look at it and I think about other challenges
that I'm sure we'll we'll dive into in this episode,
things that aren't barriers necessarily, but just considerations. The fact
that you have a large data company that operates perhaps
more like what we would think of as a Silicon
Valley startup in some ways, and also a role with
(03:00):
a company that has a more traditional approach to corporate culture,
and those sort of of potential disagreements of culture, to
me are really fascinating and how you navigate it. I
think you're You're right. I think anybody working in technology
has the natural kind of challenge of technology is changing
(03:21):
so rapidly. Business has a desire to change, but they
don't always move at the same pace. And working for
a company that is rooted in in consensus driven management,
but if we go at the pace of of getting
adverbordy to agree, there's natural tension in the system. And
that was really exactly right. Why we created a toy
To Connected as a separate company so we could go fast,
(03:43):
so we could be a digitally native company and not
have the approvals and the typical management structure that you
would in a multinational company. Well, let's learn a bit
more about you, Zach. I'm curious because I know that
your journey towards the digital and information side of things
wasn't necessarily a straight path. How did you first get
(04:05):
interested in technology? I was working at the unitineral lines
and I started off in reservations and uh, this was
a long time ago, but it was the first time
I had access to a computer, and it was to
me was fascinating that I could look up flights from
anywhere and find out what the cost was um and
find different ways to find different pricing. Back in the day,
(04:26):
if you worked in the corporation, you wanted to travel somewhere,
you found you complete a paper form to say I
have to go to Chicago for this business trip. Your
boss would sign it, the travel department would put the
price on it, and then by the time you got
that approved, the price would change and you start that
process all over again. It really wasn't the technology, but
it was what it enabled um And soon after that
was when the airlines were launching online booking tools, and
(04:50):
I was responsible for selling and supporting those with big
companies like Toyota, and and now was this putting the
information in the hands of everybody. It was a liberation
of travel information and that was exciting. And so that
was when I first came to Toyota, and how I
came to Toyota because I was supporting their travel department
(05:10):
and had a chance to interact with them, And you
said something there that really struck a chord with me.
The idea of loving what technology enables us to do
as opposed to loving a specific technology. If you love
the things that the technology allows us to do, then
that I think allows you to be a little more
flexible in adapting to new technologies that continue to fulfill
(05:36):
that mission. Is that does that sort of sound like
your philosophy? Yeah, that that's exactly right. In the early
days in I T, we used to have titles that
were products specific. So I'm a I'm an IBM CAPE engineer,
or today's world you may see it as an S
A P engineer or data specialist. But I really like
to become product agnostic in all of our roles because
(05:59):
technology change to so quickly and what maybe the right
tool today is probably not gonna be the right tool tomorrow. Well,
you joined Toyota in the mid ninety nineties. What was
your first role with the company. I started off in
the travel department and fast forward became the CEO of
a data company for Toyota. I was hired to automate
the travel processes um and to deal with exactly what
(06:21):
I just described earlier in that paper process and it
was a great experience. Also learned how to negotiate, you know,
I think in every role you'd get to learn so much.
And so I had learned how Toyota operates, I learned
the different organizational structure, and I had began to create
some relationships and at Twitter relationships I think at any
company really relationships or everything, it's how you navigate. And
(06:42):
and so that created an opportunity for me to step
in to a role because soon after that we had
launched our e business group and I was able to
be one of the founding members of our early days
of the dot com space, and that was when we thought,
you know, everybody that was in the new dot com space.
We were the digital natives and we were clicking order
and you guys are old school and brick and mortar,
(07:03):
and uh, you know, the world finally changed and caught
up to that, but we didn't go as fast as
we thought it was gonna happen at that time. But
it is fascinating because you you came on board at
really a transformational time, particularly for the automotive industry. A
lot of people my age think back to when cars
were almost a purely mechanical system with some other automated
(07:27):
features starting to work their way in, and today we
think of them as they are compute platforms themselves. We
have moved to a point where cars are some of
the most sophisticated technologies that we access on a daily basis.
I grew up watching Night Rider thinking that that was
gonna be the promise that I'd be able to hop
in my car, and it was gonna everything I wanted,
and it was gonna be this great experience. I was
(07:48):
in grade school and I remember an engineer from Ford
came in and talked to us and said, and I
was probably in in third or fourth grade, and they said,
by the time you are driving driving age, you're gonna
be in flying cars. And I believe that. And I
realized when I was about fourteen or fifteen, this is
not going to happen, but it's still the promise. Well,
I'm curious in your career at Toyota, are there any
(08:09):
projects that stand out defining moments that either shaped your
philosophy or reinforced something that you had made as part
of your philosophy. The first big learning that I had
was UM I had been in the E business group,
and then there was our big our biggest project within
Toyota on the technical side, which was automating all of
(08:31):
our dealer operations, so building a new retail system. The
project had was was failing. The c I O asked
me to take it over. I hadn't had a formal
role in corporate I T so it was it was.
It was a big leap. They put a lot of
trust in me. I probably wasn't qualified to take it
at that time, contractors working on a couple hundred Toyota employees.
(08:54):
It was. It was overwhelming and the only way I
could get my arms around it was I had just
finished my undergraduate degree cause I was going to school
at night, and so I approached it from a business
lens of trying to put controls around the costs, and
that helped to kind of bring it back. And I
also created a strong team that I could trust. So,
you know, a year and a half or almost two
years later, when I landed the project, I was very
proud of myself. The CIO calls me in her office
(09:16):
and I'm waiting for a pat on the back and
and she said, you know, you really turned it around.
You did a great job, but let's see if you
can do that again without leaving so many bodies on
the side of the road. And I was completely caught
off guard. I was very unaware. I was so focused
on getting the project back on track and doing whatever
it took to be successful that I probably wasn't the
nicest person to be around if you weren't performing. And
(09:37):
I had to learn how to be a better manager
and be a better person and get the same result.
And I'm grateful for that kind of slap that she
gave me, but I needed that awareness. I think the
other thing that was a pivotal turning point for me
was when I first became the c I O of
our sales and marketing company and about it. A few
months into the role was when Toy to face its
(09:58):
biggest crisis in our history. We went through our recall crisis,
where we had to recall almost every vehicle that that
we had produced, and all of our systems were becoming overloaded.
For example, our call center went from about six thousand
phone calls a day to over a hundred thousand phone
calls a day. We were getting d n S errors
because so many people were hitting our web pages, and
then all of our systems around driving our business began
(10:20):
to break. So we had a big mainframe system and
we had so many warranty claims that it was still processing.
It was taking thirty hours to process the warranty claims,
and so when the financial systems would come up in
the morning, all of our systems were becoming disconnected and
out of whack. And so during that time, not knowing
what to do and being a new c IL, we
had set up early morning meetings and meetings throughout the
(10:42):
day and before we don't go on home late at night.
And what we just said was whatever our employees need,
let's give them the money, the resources, but let's let's
do what they need to do to take care of
our customers. And something amazing came out of that was
the guy that was working in the main frame. He
took that batch job from over thirty hours to down
to three and a half hours. It was never three
and a half hours, even in good times. And I
(11:04):
just had that kind of clarity of moment to think, like,
why did it take for us to be in this
crisis for him to do what he knew to do.
He has been waiting for somebody to ask in this
instead of just doing it on his own. And so
I thought it was my job and our job as leaders,
as I thought, if I still have a job at
the end of this crisis, it's going to be my
life's work is to unleash the latent talent that exists
(11:25):
within our organization. And that changed the course of my
career because I then at the end of that period,
began doing things like hackathons and and at the time
it was like a science fair where we were really
pushing the innovation and we changed the trajectory of of
corporate I T because people within the I T department
really knew what to do. We shouldn't be looking to
(11:46):
contractors or other people to tell us the answer. It
was really a finding way to unleash that talent that
exists in the organization. Very true. I just want to
know if we can get sort of a sense of
the scope of your role. If someone were to ask you,
what's the size of your team, how do you answer
that question? Varies based on where we're at in the
product cycles on we're working on. Roughly I have about
(12:09):
a thousand plus direct employees, but we scale up to
over eight thousand generally with partners and outsourced relationships and
and UH. In the automotive space, there's lots of partners
in the in the ecosystem that we we work with.
For example, like any connected car, you may have a
(12:32):
telephone carrier as a partner. You've got other automotive grade
companies that are maybe building the hardware, we're helping with
the software. So these teams can get quite large during
the build period, but like most projects, there's a cycle
to them that you can kind of plan around on
what your resource needs look like. Do you have an
estimate about how many projects your teams are working on
(12:53):
at any given time. I'm imagining it's going to be
a very high number. Yeah, it's in it's in the hundreds. Fortunately,
we got eight team members, but as you can imagine,
we've got seventeen manufacturing facilities, We've got lots of sales
offices around the US UM and then plus on my
AI and our big data company. We're doing lots of products,
(13:13):
but those may be software related, so you can have
much smaller teams working on those two or next generation
of vehicle hardware and software, and those teams can get very,
very large. But there's an evolutionary period today, so we
are getting ready to launch our next generation of multimedia
screens this year and then already starting on the next
generation which will come out of a couple of years later.
(13:40):
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into who Zach is and his journey within Toyota, I
decided to drill down further into his particular approach to leadership.
(15:08):
What are some of the unique challenges that you encounter
at Toyota, Things that are very specific to your role.
I think a lot of them are probably similar to
what other people face in any type of transformational activity.
It's usually technology is not the hardest part. It's the
aligning the business and trying to triangulate as consumer behaviors
(15:30):
are changing in this direction and technology is moving in
this direction, how do we move in that same direction
and get ahead of where they are today? And what
may be a little bit more unique to working at
at Toyota UM is we are a large global company.
I probably spend at least one week of every month
in Japan, sometimes more, and so the travel can be
(15:50):
a lot, but those face to face interactions are really meaningful,
and these global teams are very important right preserving the
integrity of those relationships so that they have the meaning
that you want from them and not just feel like
it's a checklist off an email or something along those lines.
So communication is clearly an important skill for any leader
(16:16):
in any industry. It's something that when I speak to
a lot of c I O s that tends to
be one of the biggest skill sets that they really
point to that you have to be able to communicate
to very different business groups, perhaps two different customers, and
get buy in on uh ideas that and you have
(16:37):
to contextualize it and frame it in a way that
makes sense to that particular group. Would you say that
communication is is one of the top skills for someone
who's doing your role. Yeah, absolutely, I think you framed
it up right on. For me, I think it was
what allowed me to progress in my career, is be
able to have these relationships. When I first started off
(16:57):
in i T, there was this feeling that, well, the
dis knows what they want, they'll give you that prioritization.
And I felt like i T was waiting for this
leather bound strategy to be dropped off on their desk,
and it wasn't about that. It was about getting out
of your office, going with the business to the location
where the customer exists and hear the voice of the
customer and see the pain points of your business leaders.
(17:20):
And then you can bring forward and say, hey, there's
these emerging technologies that may be able to solve this problem.
Or if you're having a problem of moving these parts faster,
maybe we could put sensors on them, and here's some
some ways that we can do that. But to include
them in that process. To I D eate U, the
business does know where they want to go, they do
have a strategy, but they're not going to take the
time to write it all down and then sit down
(17:40):
with you and then tell you. You know, if they
do that problem, it's already too late. You should have
been solved before. And so I think in today's world,
to be able to engage with the business and speaking
in their terms and not overlay with a bunch of
technical jargon. It's about where we started this conversation, is
what it can enable, and envisioning that and then going
back and on your team to to begin that process.
(18:02):
But it is that communication and that intersection between I
T and business where the magic happens, and that's where
CIOs have to live. I certainly have heard from people
who work in various I T jobs that a pain
point typically ends up being, yeah, but why are we
doing this? Like I know what I'm supposed to do,
(18:23):
I don't know why I am doing it. But as
you point out, when you go back to that use
case where you're saying, let's look at what we're trying
to enable, when that becomes a parent and everyone understands that,
it clears away a lot of the problems that you
would typically see otherwise. What is it that really excites
you about your work? What are the things that get
(18:46):
you up out of bed when you're about to jump
on another flight over to Japan, or you're about to
head to Europe, or you're just going into one of
your offices. Were at Toyota when when we created toy
to Connect in we talked about what should our goals
be and it wasn't just about ingesting the data. Anybody
can do that, and we knew we wanted to use
(19:06):
the data for customers to make their lives better. And
we set a lofty goal of saying Toya Connected should
be making the world better. And it sounded a little
bit cheesy or maybe overreaching, but we've done these hackathons
and we've challenged our team members of how can we
use data to make customers lives better? And I'm blown away.
(19:27):
You know, I can give you some examples where, um,
we've come up with this concept and we're testing out
right now. Is in in an amber alert, we can
pop up a message on on the person's screening their
car and say can we use your outward facing camera
to look for this license plate? And if you opt in,
then you've got an army of cars that are looking
to help, you know, find a lost child. We can
(19:48):
use that same technology if there's let's say, a wildfire
like in California, as there was last year, and maybe
we know that you know that there's toyotas in that area,
that we can light up those cameras let the firefighters
know exactly where the fire is occurring. Too. We're doing
some testing right now with some nanotechnology to be able
to detect if there's a life form left in a vehicle.
So if a baby has been forgotten in the car,
(20:10):
even if they've fallen asleep, can we pick up their heartbeat.
So I really believe that technology or the data isn't
about selling more ads. It's about making the world a
better place, and my team is doing that. As someone
who covers technology for a living, I find that extremely refreshing,
the idea of using technology to enable things that have
(20:31):
a positive impact. It's a subtle way of presenting the
information where in one instance it is not intrusive and
it's helpful, and in the other instance it's obnoxious. I
also think to the other thing is it can be
if not used the right way, it can be creepy.
So I we talked a lot about not being creepy
but being delightful and inspiring our customers. And so example,
(20:54):
I I can use is um if a customer wants
to share with us their likes. And I know that
somebody customer likes say Taylor Swift, and they're heading down
the road that they've not traveled before, but now it's
in the general direction of where Taylor Switch is performing.
We can say, hey, it looks like you're heading to
the Tailor Swift concert. That could just be creepy, but
what could be delightful as where I can say, can
I route you around traffic and prepay your parking? That
(21:15):
becomes delightful and so. And if the customer has clear
control of his or her data and opting into these services,
then it's it's more meaningful. The automotive industry has been
a key component in the technological sector for more than
a century. You really get the full spectrum of tech,
from manufacturing processes to supply chain management, to data analysis
(21:39):
to implementing new technological features into consumer products. I wanted
to learn more about what Zach is interested in and
maybe even get a sneak peek into where the automotive
industry is headed next. So today or or connected vehicles
share data and and at a at a basic level,
if a customer is in an accident and nearbag is
(22:00):
deployed and they've opted in for these services, we can
notify a nine O one responder to know exactly where
the accident occurred. And even as we're getting begin to
get more data from the vehicles, we could let them know, well,
there was three seat belts buckled, or the accident occurred
at this velocity UM and maybe even as data gets
in our algorithms get better, we can begin to estimate
(22:21):
UM what other problems may have occurred UH and and
give that to the nine one responders. UM to some
of the services that you've you've talked about UM helping
people and say the next time of in this area
and I want to try this, UH this new bakery.
Have the car remind you that you're in that area
that you know, maybe pick up some some bake goods. UM.
(22:42):
One of the things we recently got a patent on
that will be releasing, which is more of a convenience service.
So we can look at UM as somebody's entering a
parking garage and we can tell by how fast you're
accelerating up the hill and what they all right, and
the turn rate looks like our algorithms can now with
maybe roughly around accuracy, can tell somebody looks like you're
the third level of a parking garage in the northeast corner,
(23:02):
so as you get out of your car, to pop
up on your screen to remind you where you parked
at in a parking garage. So from convenience services to
late life saving services, that's what connectivity means to me.
It's still I would suggest it's early days. All of
the data coming on the car is not meaningful. It's
too costly to manage and process all of that data.
So I think in the future you're going to see
(23:23):
more of this processing happening on the edge, happening in
the vehicle, and the customers will dictate those services that
they want and which ones they don't want. I imagine
we're looking at instances where machine learning and artificial intelligence
and some data automation are going to play a big
part in that. And in my view of the future,
(23:43):
it becomes a thing where every single person's experience with
their vehicle becomes more and more personalized, to a point
where if you were to step into someone else's car
and drive it for a little while, you might just
feel like, Wow, this is a really different experience because
it's no longer specifically catered to the way I drive
and the places I go. But to me, that's that's
really exciting. This release that we're going to have this
(24:05):
year on some of our new vehicles will solve that
for you. So the next time you get into a
Toyoto or Alexis vehicle, your persona will travel with you.
So if you your preset destinations on your head unit,
your temperature controls, maybe even your seat settings, and you
can even have the flow with you perhaps in the
future when you get into an uber or lift to
make sure that we've got the right temperature controls and
maybe even which music you want to hear. So, just
(24:27):
like your phone, which knows everything about you, if you
want to share that with your vehicle, we can make
sure that it goes from vehicle to vehicle with you
and then disappears from a privacy and security point of
view as you exit that vehicle. Zach, you're talking magic
to me now. But then Arthur C. Clark said, any
technology sufficiently sophisticated seems like magic. So you know, that's
connectivity that I think of as being very outward facing
(24:49):
for consumers. I imagine that behind the scene internally, that
connectivity plays an enormous role at Toyota, from the corporate
side to the manufacturing side. Absolutely, you know, on the
manufacturing side, I think that's kind of the next huge opportunity,
which which I think all manufacturing companies are experiencing and
(25:10):
experimenting on, and so from a manufacturing perspective, our products
and quality continue to get better and better and better
because we have real time information as anything is going wrong,
instead of waiting for it to come off the line
and the customer experiencing a problem and then having to
fix it. But we do have that feedback loop now
as our cars are getting serviced in the garage, all
of that data goes into our machine learning algorithms to
(25:32):
understand is it's the problems is torn and how can
we fix that on the line so it doesn't happen again.
Um Or let our suppliers know that they're We're starting
to see some failures in these areas um to how
we design cars knowing that certain features may not be
being used very much in the vehicle, So why I
spend the money if the customer doesn't care about it.
Everything that we do is connected in from a corporate
(25:53):
I T perspective, your I T infrastructure is just a
digital manifestation of how you do business. That's a good
lens and to look to how companies operating well and
with this connectivity. I mean, obviously, connectivity can't happen unless
you have the technologies that actually allow different pieces to
communicate with one another. And with the rollout of five
(26:16):
G technologies, we're seeing some new potential applications, whether we're
talking about high frequency five G where you can have
very high throughput, low latency just to to the other
flavors as well. What sort of ways are Toyota implementing
or relying upon five G technologies. So I can't give
(26:38):
you specifics and some of these future products, but I
can share with you that we are looking at five
G because we do see opportunities for improved safety, reducing
traffic congestion, and delivering rich media experiences in the vehicle,
not just for the driver but for the passengers. So
those experiences should just flow naturally and should be enabled.
And five G is going to be a great opportunity
(26:59):
to to do that in a much more meaningqual way.
But I also think that we're still going to always
need edge computing for really fast decisions. So as you're
looking at two more autonomy in our vehicles, you still
don't want to be relying to go up to the
cloud to make a decision. You want to be making
decisions real time on that vehicle. So to that end,
do you also see cars as playing an important role
(27:20):
in things like smart city infrastructure where there's perhaps the
the opportunity for vehicles on the road to interact with
city infrastructure and to do things like reduced traffic congestion
things like that. Yeah, huge opportunities, I think, and that's
one of the great promises of five g S to
allow cities to better manage that and help with the
(27:41):
interplay between the driver and the infrastructure to have better routput.
One thing people may have not not have not heard yet,
but we're launching a prototype city in Japan called Woven City,
pretty close to Mount Fuji, and the whole concept there
is that people will live there and researchers and research
groups will come in, and that's what we're trying out.
(28:03):
You may be surprised to learn that in the city
center that there won't be cars driving through our personally
owned vehicles, and that may be shocking for Toyo to do,
but we're trying to envision what that better future can
look like. And it's that interplay between walking, public transportation,
personally owned vehicles, shared vehicles. How will that work in
a much more smooth environment. Five gigle play a large
(28:24):
part of that, but we all have to work together,
private and public entities to to enable that future. And
related to that, I mean, I've I've heard that you
have described Toyota as really a mobility company, and uh,
that really caught my attention to because it speaks to
something much larger than even automotive company. Can you go
(28:45):
into a little more detail about what you mean when
you say it's a mobility company. Yeah, And internally, when
we we talked about being a mobility company, I like
to share that it could be helping somebody get across
country or getting across our living room if they have
limited mobility. It's not just a personally owned vehicle. And
so we've got lots of prototypes and testing around the
world where we're interacting with public transportation. So how does
(29:08):
somebody take their personal vehicle drive to maybe a train station,
and from that train station maybe to a bus, and
then even if they get off the bus, how do
we still get them to their destination where they want
to go to. That's the opportunity. So we we won't
define mobility, our customers will. And we get right back
to that philosophy of how do we leverage technology to
enable the outcome that we desire. Do you have any
(29:30):
particular favorite emerging technologies things that you're really excited about
or curious about. I think video is on board. We're
also looking at another use case where seniors that have dementia,
if they're not found within twenty four hours, there's high
risk to their life. But could we even use outward
facing technology to help find that person on a camera
(29:52):
but not risk other people's privacy or you know, we
we did a test where vehicles go through every intersection
in Tokyo every fifteen minutes, and so we help them
look for litter and and for things in the road
that could be an obstacle and then feed that information
that could be used in our vehicles today for looking
for ice or when we detect our any lock breaks
starting to you know, see some slipping on the roads happening.
(30:14):
Could we feed that information to local authorities so they
can come in and take care of the roads in
that area. I think we can make life better if
we use this technology in a way that still keeps
people's privacy safe, insecure, but allows us to have a
better life. Before I could let Zach go, I needed
to ask him one more thing. At the end of
(30:35):
the day, what opportunity are you most excited to pursue?
The opportunity to build faster services and products for our customers,
to make a better experience in a better world. That's
a great answer, and and I cannot stress enough to
my audience that that itself is a is an enormous challenge.
(30:56):
When you're looking at an industry like the car industry,
where you are marrying this very rapid iteration of technology
and potential implementations of it into platforms that have incredible
legacy behind them, and you have to honor both. That
is an an enormous challenge and one that I find
(31:18):
really fascinating. So Zach, thank you so much for joining
us today. Thank you for having me. I enjoyed it.
Thanks again to Zach Hicks for taking time to speak
with us on The Restless Ones. My big takeaways really
(31:39):
come back to something Zach said early on, focusing on
how technology enables us to do specific things without getting
bogged down into specific instances of tech. That's what's really important.
It's what frees up organizations to pursue a mission without
turning tech into an anchor that slows things down. And
(32:00):
involving the I. T side of a business in a
more integral and coherent approach really can have enormous benefits,
removing communication barriers and making it easier to achieve buy in.
And of course, the evolving technologies that facilitate this kind
of approach to business are absolutely critical. Without them, we'd
have great ideas but no way to execute them. Connectivity
(32:24):
is crucial for Toyota, but I think it's safe to
say it's importance is evident across all industries. With solutions
like five G opening up new ways to achieve connectivity,
we're headed toward a very exciting future. Make sure you
join us for the next episode of The Restless Ones
as we continue to speak with the leaders who are
(32:45):
bringing the future into the present. I'm Jonathan Strickland. These days,
new ways of working have become the norm, and the
status oh no longer cuts it when it comes to
helping businesses evolve and grow. That's why T Mobile for
Business uses unconventional thinking to help businesses sees innovation only.
(33:10):
T Mobile offers America's largest and fastest five gene network,
which makes their new WFX solutions possible, letting businesses stay
connected and productive where work happens. See what T Mobile
for Business can do for you at t mobile dot com.
Slash Unconventional Open Signal awarded T mobile fastest five G
network based on average speeds. USA five G User Experience Report, January.
(33:33):
Capable device required coverage not available in some areas. Some
users may require certain plann or feature see t mobile
dot com
We are looking at five G because we do see
opportunities for improved safety, reducing traffic congestion, and delivering rich
media experiences in the vehicle, not just for the driver
but for the passengers. So those experiences should just flow
naturally and should be enabled, and five G is going
to be a great opportunity to do that in a
much more meaningqual way. Welcome to the Restless Ones, where
(00:26):
we speak with the leaders who push the envelope when
it comes to technological innovations and solutions, leaders who don't
follow standards they set them. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
Our guest today is Zach Hicks of Toyota, North America.
He has worked in several capacities at Toyota, eventually occupying
the role of ce IO. As ce IO, he received
(00:49):
numerous awards and accolades, but he didn't stop there. Zack
found himself tackling challenges and taking opportunities that don't fall
neatly into the c I O bucket. Zach, thank you
so much for joining us on the Restless Ones. It's
(01:09):
a real pleasure to be able to sit down and
have a conversation with you. Thanks Jonathan, I appreciate the opportunity.
Before we jump into your background, one thing I would
love to do is just hear from you what you're
full official title is, because I think that just me
saying it might take up an entire episode. It sounds
(01:31):
like a lot. But they're all very closely related, you know.
So in in North America, I'm the Chief Digital Officer.
I'm responsible for digital transformation and mobility. In those functions,
I have traditional I T Corporate I T for sales
and manufacturing and all of the functions within Toyota and
North America. I'm also responsible for our Connected Technologies, which
(01:52):
is our in vehicle, the hardware and software and the
multimedia units in the vehicle. UM. I also have a
mobility the group, and that's kind of how we look
at mobility in the future, rideshare, car share and new
ways of operating. And then almost five years ago, we
launched a big data a I M L company called
toy To Connected and for that I'm the CEO. So
(02:15):
I spend a lot of time bouncing back and forth
between the two roles, but they're very interrelated, so it's
not like to managing two completely separate jobs. There's a
lot of overlap there, and I do have a role
within our parent company in Japan. As a Japanese title
of combo shoku just means management executive management over mobility.
I love your humility and modesty because from my perspective,
(02:38):
I look at it and I think about other challenges
that I'm sure we'll we'll dive into in this episode,
things that aren't barriers necessarily, but just considerations. The fact
that you have a large data company that operates perhaps
more like what we would think of as a Silicon
Valley startup in some ways, and also a role with
(03:00):
a company that has a more traditional approach to corporate culture,
and those sort of of potential disagreements of culture, to
me are really fascinating and how you navigate it. I
think you're You're right. I think anybody working in technology
has the natural kind of challenge of technology is changing
(03:21):
so rapidly. Business has a desire to change, but they
don't always move at the same pace. And working for
a company that is rooted in in consensus driven management,
but if we go at the pace of of getting
adverbordy to agree, there's natural tension in the system. And
that was really exactly right. Why we created a toy
To Connected as a separate company so we could go fast,
(03:43):
so we could be a digitally native company and not
have the approvals and the typical management structure that you
would in a multinational company. Well, let's learn a bit
more about you, Zach. I'm curious because I know that
your journey towards the digital and information side of things
wasn't necessarily a straight path. How did you first get
(04:05):
interested in technology? I was working at the unitineral lines
and I started off in reservations and uh, this was
a long time ago, but it was the first time
I had access to a computer, and it was to
me was fascinating that I could look up flights from
anywhere and find out what the cost was um and
find different ways to find different pricing. Back in the day,
(04:26):
if you worked in the corporation, you wanted to travel somewhere,
you found you complete a paper form to say I
have to go to Chicago for this business trip. Your
boss would sign it, the travel department would put the
price on it, and then by the time you got
that approved, the price would change and you start that
process all over again. It really wasn't the technology, but
it was what it enabled um And soon after that
was when the airlines were launching online booking tools, and
(04:50):
I was responsible for selling and supporting those with big
companies like Toyota, and and now was this putting the
information in the hands of everybody. It was a liberation
of travel information and that was exciting. And so that
was when I first came to Toyota, and how I
came to Toyota because I was supporting their travel department
(05:10):
and had a chance to interact with them, And you
said something there that really struck a chord with me.
The idea of loving what technology enables us to do
as opposed to loving a specific technology. If you love
the things that the technology allows us to do, then
that I think allows you to be a little more
flexible in adapting to new technologies that continue to fulfill
(05:36):
that mission. Is that does that sort of sound like
your philosophy? Yeah, that that's exactly right. In the early
days in I T, we used to have titles that
were products specific. So I'm a I'm an IBM CAPE engineer,
or today's world you may see it as an S
A P engineer or data specialist. But I really like
to become product agnostic in all of our roles because
(05:59):
technology change to so quickly and what maybe the right
tool today is probably not gonna be the right tool tomorrow. Well,
you joined Toyota in the mid ninety nineties. What was
your first role with the company. I started off in
the travel department and fast forward became the CEO of
a data company for Toyota. I was hired to automate
the travel processes um and to deal with exactly what
(06:21):
I just described earlier in that paper process and it
was a great experience. Also learned how to negotiate, you know,
I think in every role you'd get to learn so much.
And so I had learned how Toyota operates, I learned
the different organizational structure, and I had began to create
some relationships and at Twitter relationships I think at any
company really relationships or everything, it's how you navigate. And
(06:42):
and so that created an opportunity for me to step
in to a role because soon after that we had
launched our e business group and I was able to
be one of the founding members of our early days
of the dot com space, and that was when we thought,
you know, everybody that was in the new dot com space.
We were the digital natives and we were clicking order
and you guys are old school and brick and mortar,
(07:03):
and uh, you know, the world finally changed and caught
up to that, but we didn't go as fast as
we thought it was gonna happen at that time. But
it is fascinating because you you came on board at
really a transformational time, particularly for the automotive industry. A
lot of people my age think back to when cars
were almost a purely mechanical system with some other automated
(07:27):
features starting to work their way in, and today we
think of them as they are compute platforms themselves. We
have moved to a point where cars are some of
the most sophisticated technologies that we access on a daily basis.
I grew up watching Night Rider thinking that that was
gonna be the promise that I'd be able to hop
in my car, and it was gonna everything I wanted,
and it was gonna be this great experience. I was
(07:48):
in grade school and I remember an engineer from Ford
came in and talked to us and said, and I
was probably in in third or fourth grade, and they said,
by the time you are driving driving age, you're gonna
be in flying cars. And I believe that. And I
realized when I was about fourteen or fifteen, this is
not going to happen, but it's still the promise. Well,
I'm curious in your career at Toyota, are there any
(08:09):
projects that stand out defining moments that either shaped your
philosophy or reinforced something that you had made as part
of your philosophy. The first big learning that I had
was UM I had been in the E business group,
and then there was our big our biggest project within
Toyota on the technical side, which was automating all of
(08:31):
our dealer operations, so building a new retail system. The
project had was was failing. The c I O asked
me to take it over. I hadn't had a formal
role in corporate I T so it was it was.
It was a big leap. They put a lot of
trust in me. I probably wasn't qualified to take it
at that time, contractors working on a couple hundred Toyota employees.
(08:54):
It was. It was overwhelming and the only way I
could get my arms around it was I had just
finished my undergraduate degree cause I was going to school
at night, and so I approached it from a business
lens of trying to put controls around the costs, and
that helped to kind of bring it back. And I
also created a strong team that I could trust. So,
you know, a year and a half or almost two
years later, when I landed the project, I was very
proud of myself. The CIO calls me in her office
(09:16):
and I'm waiting for a pat on the back and
and she said, you know, you really turned it around.
You did a great job, but let's see if you
can do that again without leaving so many bodies on
the side of the road. And I was completely caught
off guard. I was very unaware. I was so focused
on getting the project back on track and doing whatever
it took to be successful that I probably wasn't the
nicest person to be around if you weren't performing. And
(09:37):
I had to learn how to be a better manager
and be a better person and get the same result.
And I'm grateful for that kind of slap that she
gave me, but I needed that awareness. I think the
other thing that was a pivotal turning point for me
was when I first became the c I O of
our sales and marketing company and about it. A few
months into the role was when Toy to face its
(09:58):
biggest crisis in our history. We went through our recall crisis,
where we had to recall almost every vehicle that that
we had produced, and all of our systems were becoming overloaded.
For example, our call center went from about six thousand
phone calls a day to over a hundred thousand phone
calls a day. We were getting d n S errors
because so many people were hitting our web pages, and
then all of our systems around driving our business began
(10:20):
to break. So we had a big mainframe system and
we had so many warranty claims that it was still processing.
It was taking thirty hours to process the warranty claims,
and so when the financial systems would come up in
the morning, all of our systems were becoming disconnected and
out of whack. And so during that time, not knowing
what to do and being a new c IL, we
had set up early morning meetings and meetings throughout the
(10:42):
day and before we don't go on home late at night.
And what we just said was whatever our employees need,
let's give them the money, the resources, but let's let's
do what they need to do to take care of
our customers. And something amazing came out of that was
the guy that was working in the main frame. He
took that batch job from over thirty hours to down
to three and a half hours. It was never three
and a half hours, even in good times. And I
(11:04):
just had that kind of clarity of moment to think, like,
why did it take for us to be in this
crisis for him to do what he knew to do.
He has been waiting for somebody to ask in this
instead of just doing it on his own. And so
I thought it was my job and our job as leaders,
as I thought, if I still have a job at
the end of this crisis, it's going to be my
life's work is to unleash the latent talent that exists
(11:25):
within our organization. And that changed the course of my
career because I then at the end of that period,
began doing things like hackathons and and at the time
it was like a science fair where we were really
pushing the innovation and we changed the trajectory of of
corporate I T because people within the I T department
really knew what to do. We shouldn't be looking to
(11:46):
contractors or other people to tell us the answer. It
was really a finding way to unleash that talent that
exists in the organization. Very true. I just want to
know if we can get sort of a sense of
the scope of your role. If someone were to ask you,
what's the size of your team, how do you answer
that question? Varies based on where we're at in the
product cycles on we're working on. Roughly I have about
(12:09):
a thousand plus direct employees, but we scale up to
over eight thousand generally with partners and outsourced relationships and
and UH. In the automotive space, there's lots of partners
in the in the ecosystem that we we work with.
For example, like any connected car, you may have a
(12:32):
telephone carrier as a partner. You've got other automotive grade
companies that are maybe building the hardware, we're helping with
the software. So these teams can get quite large during
the build period, but like most projects, there's a cycle
to them that you can kind of plan around on
what your resource needs look like. Do you have an
estimate about how many projects your teams are working on
(12:53):
at any given time. I'm imagining it's going to be
a very high number. Yeah, it's in it's in the hundreds. Fortunately,
we got eight team members, but as you can imagine,
we've got seventeen manufacturing facilities, We've got lots of sales
offices around the US UM and then plus on my
AI and our big data company. We're doing lots of products,
(13:13):
but those may be software related, so you can have
much smaller teams working on those two or next generation
of vehicle hardware and software, and those teams can get very,
very large. But there's an evolutionary period today, so we
are getting ready to launch our next generation of multimedia
screens this year and then already starting on the next
generation which will come out of a couple of years later.
(13:40):
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fastest five G network based on average speeds USA five
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available in some areas. Some users may require certain planner
feature see T mobile dot com. Having a better insight
into who Zach is and his journey within Toyota, I
decided to drill down further into his particular approach to leadership.
(15:08):
What are some of the unique challenges that you encounter
at Toyota, Things that are very specific to your role.
I think a lot of them are probably similar to
what other people face in any type of transformational activity.
It's usually technology is not the hardest part. It's the
aligning the business and trying to triangulate as consumer behaviors
(15:30):
are changing in this direction and technology is moving in
this direction, how do we move in that same direction
and get ahead of where they are today? And what
may be a little bit more unique to working at
at Toyota UM is we are a large global company.
I probably spend at least one week of every month
in Japan, sometimes more, and so the travel can be
(15:50):
a lot, but those face to face interactions are really meaningful,
and these global teams are very important right preserving the
integrity of those relationships so that they have the meaning
that you want from them and not just feel like
it's a checklist off an email or something along those lines.
So communication is clearly an important skill for any leader
(16:16):
in any industry. It's something that when I speak to
a lot of c I O s that tends to
be one of the biggest skill sets that they really
point to that you have to be able to communicate
to very different business groups, perhaps two different customers, and
get buy in on uh ideas that and you have
(16:37):
to contextualize it and frame it in a way that
makes sense to that particular group. Would you say that
communication is is one of the top skills for someone
who's doing your role. Yeah, absolutely, I think you framed
it up right on. For me, I think it was
what allowed me to progress in my career, is be
able to have these relationships. When I first started off
(16:57):
in i T, there was this feeling that, well, the
dis knows what they want, they'll give you that prioritization.
And I felt like i T was waiting for this
leather bound strategy to be dropped off on their desk,
and it wasn't about that. It was about getting out
of your office, going with the business to the location
where the customer exists and hear the voice of the
customer and see the pain points of your business leaders.
(17:20):
And then you can bring forward and say, hey, there's
these emerging technologies that may be able to solve this problem.
Or if you're having a problem of moving these parts faster,
maybe we could put sensors on them, and here's some
some ways that we can do that. But to include
them in that process. To I D eate U, the
business does know where they want to go, they do
have a strategy, but they're not going to take the
time to write it all down and then sit down
(17:40):
with you and then tell you. You know, if they
do that problem, it's already too late. You should have
been solved before. And so I think in today's world,
to be able to engage with the business and speaking
in their terms and not overlay with a bunch of
technical jargon. It's about where we started this conversation, is
what it can enable, and envisioning that and then going
back and on your team to to begin that process.
(18:02):
But it is that communication and that intersection between I
T and business where the magic happens, and that's where
CIOs have to live. I certainly have heard from people
who work in various I T jobs that a pain
point typically ends up being, yeah, but why are we
doing this? Like I know what I'm supposed to do,
(18:23):
I don't know why I am doing it. But as
you point out, when you go back to that use
case where you're saying, let's look at what we're trying
to enable, when that becomes a parent and everyone understands that,
it clears away a lot of the problems that you
would typically see otherwise. What is it that really excites
you about your work? What are the things that get
(18:46):
you up out of bed when you're about to jump
on another flight over to Japan, or you're about to
head to Europe, or you're just going into one of
your offices. Were at Toyota when when we created toy
to Connect in we talked about what should our goals
be and it wasn't just about ingesting the data. Anybody
can do that, and we knew we wanted to use
(19:06):
the data for customers to make their lives better. And
we set a lofty goal of saying Toya Connected should
be making the world better. And it sounded a little
bit cheesy or maybe overreaching, but we've done these hackathons
and we've challenged our team members of how can we
use data to make customers lives better? And I'm blown away.
(19:27):
You know, I can give you some examples where, um,
we've come up with this concept and we're testing out
right now. Is in in an amber alert, we can
pop up a message on on the person's screening their
car and say can we use your outward facing camera
to look for this license plate? And if you opt in,
then you've got an army of cars that are looking
to help, you know, find a lost child. We can
(19:48):
use that same technology if there's let's say, a wildfire
like in California, as there was last year, and maybe
we know that you know that there's toyotas in that area,
that we can light up those cameras let the firefighters
know exactly where the fire is occurring. Too. We're doing
some testing right now with some nanotechnology to be able
to detect if there's a life form left in a vehicle.
So if a baby has been forgotten in the car,
(20:10):
even if they've fallen asleep, can we pick up their heartbeat.
So I really believe that technology or the data isn't
about selling more ads. It's about making the world a
better place, and my team is doing that. As someone
who covers technology for a living, I find that extremely refreshing,
the idea of using technology to enable things that have
(20:31):
a positive impact. It's a subtle way of presenting the
information where in one instance it is not intrusive and
it's helpful, and in the other instance it's obnoxious. I
also think to the other thing is it can be
if not used the right way, it can be creepy.
So I we talked a lot about not being creepy
but being delightful and inspiring our customers. And so example,
(20:54):
I I can use is um if a customer wants
to share with us their likes. And I know that
somebody customer likes say Taylor Swift, and they're heading down
the road that they've not traveled before, but now it's
in the general direction of where Taylor Switch is performing.
We can say, hey, it looks like you're heading to
the Tailor Swift concert. That could just be creepy, but
what could be delightful as where I can say, can
I route you around traffic and prepay your parking? That
(21:15):
becomes delightful and so. And if the customer has clear
control of his or her data and opting into these services,
then it's it's more meaningful. The automotive industry has been
a key component in the technological sector for more than
a century. You really get the full spectrum of tech,
from manufacturing processes to supply chain management, to data analysis
(21:39):
to implementing new technological features into consumer products. I wanted
to learn more about what Zach is interested in and
maybe even get a sneak peek into where the automotive
industry is headed next. So today or or connected vehicles
share data and and at a at a basic level,
if a customer is in an accident and nearbag is
(22:00):
deployed and they've opted in for these services, we can
notify a nine O one responder to know exactly where
the accident occurred. And even as we're getting begin to
get more data from the vehicles, we could let them know, well,
there was three seat belts buckled, or the accident occurred
at this velocity UM and maybe even as data gets
in our algorithms get better, we can begin to estimate
(22:21):
UM what other problems may have occurred UH and and
give that to the nine one responders. UM to some
of the services that you've you've talked about UM helping
people and say the next time of in this area
and I want to try this, UH this new bakery.
Have the car remind you that you're in that area
that you know, maybe pick up some some bake goods. UM.
(22:42):
One of the things we recently got a patent on
that will be releasing, which is more of a convenience service.
So we can look at UM as somebody's entering a
parking garage and we can tell by how fast you're
accelerating up the hill and what they all right, and
the turn rate looks like our algorithms can now with
maybe roughly around accuracy, can tell somebody looks like you're
the third level of a parking garage in the northeast corner,
(23:02):
so as you get out of your car, to pop
up on your screen to remind you where you parked
at in a parking garage. So from convenience services to
late life saving services, that's what connectivity means to me.
It's still I would suggest it's early days. All of
the data coming on the car is not meaningful. It's
too costly to manage and process all of that data.
So I think in the future you're going to see
(23:23):
more of this processing happening on the edge, happening in
the vehicle, and the customers will dictate those services that
they want and which ones they don't want. I imagine
we're looking at instances where machine learning and artificial intelligence
and some data automation are going to play a big
part in that. And in my view of the future,
(23:43):
it becomes a thing where every single person's experience with
their vehicle becomes more and more personalized, to a point
where if you were to step into someone else's car
and drive it for a little while, you might just
feel like, Wow, this is a really different experience because
it's no longer specifically catered to the way I drive
and the places I go. But to me, that's that's
really exciting. This release that we're going to have this
(24:05):
year on some of our new vehicles will solve that
for you. So the next time you get into a
Toyoto or Alexis vehicle, your persona will travel with you.
So if you your preset destinations on your head unit,
your temperature controls, maybe even your seat settings, and you
can even have the flow with you perhaps in the
future when you get into an uber or lift to
make sure that we've got the right temperature controls and
maybe even which music you want to hear. So, just
(24:27):
like your phone, which knows everything about you, if you
want to share that with your vehicle, we can make
sure that it goes from vehicle to vehicle with you
and then disappears from a privacy and security point of
view as you exit that vehicle. Zach, you're talking magic
to me now. But then Arthur C. Clark said, any
technology sufficiently sophisticated seems like magic. So you know, that's
connectivity that I think of as being very outward facing
(24:49):
for consumers. I imagine that behind the scene internally, that
connectivity plays an enormous role at Toyota, from the corporate
side to the manufacturing side. Absolutely, you know, on the
manufacturing side, I think that's kind of the next huge opportunity,
which which I think all manufacturing companies are experiencing and
(25:10):
experimenting on, and so from a manufacturing perspective, our products
and quality continue to get better and better and better
because we have real time information as anything is going wrong,
instead of waiting for it to come off the line
and the customer experiencing a problem and then having to
fix it. But we do have that feedback loop now
as our cars are getting serviced in the garage, all
of that data goes into our machine learning algorithms to
(25:32):
understand is it's the problems is torn and how can
we fix that on the line so it doesn't happen again.
Um Or let our suppliers know that they're We're starting
to see some failures in these areas um to how
we design cars knowing that certain features may not be
being used very much in the vehicle, So why I
spend the money if the customer doesn't care about it.
Everything that we do is connected in from a corporate
(25:53):
I T perspective, your I T infrastructure is just a
digital manifestation of how you do business. That's a good
lens and to look to how companies operating well and
with this connectivity. I mean, obviously, connectivity can't happen unless
you have the technologies that actually allow different pieces to
communicate with one another. And with the rollout of five
(26:16):
G technologies, we're seeing some new potential applications, whether we're
talking about high frequency five G where you can have
very high throughput, low latency just to to the other
flavors as well. What sort of ways are Toyota implementing
or relying upon five G technologies. So I can't give
(26:38):
you specifics and some of these future products, but I
can share with you that we are looking at five
G because we do see opportunities for improved safety, reducing
traffic congestion, and delivering rich media experiences in the vehicle,
not just for the driver but for the passengers. So
those experiences should just flow naturally and should be enabled.
And five G is going to be a great opportunity
(26:59):
to to do that in a much more meaningqual way.
But I also think that we're still going to always
need edge computing for really fast decisions. So as you're
looking at two more autonomy in our vehicles, you still
don't want to be relying to go up to the
cloud to make a decision. You want to be making
decisions real time on that vehicle. So to that end,
do you also see cars as playing an important role
(27:20):
in things like smart city infrastructure where there's perhaps the
the opportunity for vehicles on the road to interact with
city infrastructure and to do things like reduced traffic congestion
things like that. Yeah, huge opportunities, I think, and that's
one of the great promises of five g S to
allow cities to better manage that and help with the
(27:41):
interplay between the driver and the infrastructure to have better routput.
One thing people may have not not have not heard yet,
but we're launching a prototype city in Japan called Woven City,
pretty close to Mount Fuji, and the whole concept there
is that people will live there and researchers and research
groups will come in, and that's what we're trying out.
(28:03):
You may be surprised to learn that in the city
center that there won't be cars driving through our personally
owned vehicles, and that may be shocking for Toyo to do,
but we're trying to envision what that better future can
look like. And it's that interplay between walking, public transportation,
personally owned vehicles, shared vehicles. How will that work in
a much more smooth environment. Five gigle play a large
(28:24):
part of that, but we all have to work together,
private and public entities to to enable that future. And
related to that, I mean, I've I've heard that you
have described Toyota as really a mobility company, and uh,
that really caught my attention to because it speaks to
something much larger than even automotive company. Can you go
(28:45):
into a little more detail about what you mean when
you say it's a mobility company. Yeah, And internally, when
we we talked about being a mobility company, I like
to share that it could be helping somebody get across
country or getting across our living room if they have
limited mobility. It's not just a personally owned vehicle. And
so we've got lots of prototypes and testing around the
world where we're interacting with public transportation. So how does
(29:08):
somebody take their personal vehicle drive to maybe a train station,
and from that train station maybe to a bus, and
then even if they get off the bus, how do
we still get them to their destination where they want
to go to. That's the opportunity. So we we won't
define mobility, our customers will. And we get right back
to that philosophy of how do we leverage technology to
enable the outcome that we desire. Do you have any
(29:30):
particular favorite emerging technologies things that you're really excited about
or curious about. I think video is on board. We're
also looking at another use case where seniors that have dementia,
if they're not found within twenty four hours, there's high
risk to their life. But could we even use outward
facing technology to help find that person on a camera
(29:52):
but not risk other people's privacy or you know, we
we did a test where vehicles go through every intersection
in Tokyo every fifteen minutes, and so we help them
look for litter and and for things in the road
that could be an obstacle and then feed that information
that could be used in our vehicles today for looking
for ice or when we detect our any lock breaks
starting to you know, see some slipping on the roads happening.
(30:14):
Could we feed that information to local authorities so they
can come in and take care of the roads in
that area. I think we can make life better if
we use this technology in a way that still keeps
people's privacy safe, insecure, but allows us to have a
better life. Before I could let Zach go, I needed
to ask him one more thing. At the end of
(30:35):
the day, what opportunity are you most excited to pursue?
The opportunity to build faster services and products for our customers,
to make a better experience in a better world. That's
a great answer, and and I cannot stress enough to
my audience that that itself is a is an enormous challenge.
(30:56):
When you're looking at an industry like the car industry,
where you are marrying this very rapid iteration of technology
and potential implementations of it into platforms that have incredible
legacy behind them, and you have to honor both. That
is an an enormous challenge and one that I find
(31:18):
really fascinating. So Zach, thank you so much for joining
us today. Thank you for having me. I enjoyed it.
Thanks again to Zach Hicks for taking time to speak
with us on The Restless Ones. My big takeaways really
(31:39):
come back to something Zach said early on, focusing on
how technology enables us to do specific things without getting
bogged down into specific instances of tech. That's what's really important.
It's what frees up organizations to pursue a mission without
turning tech into an anchor that slows things down. And
(32:00):
involving the I. T side of a business in a
more integral and coherent approach really can have enormous benefits,
removing communication barriers and making it easier to achieve buy in.
And of course, the evolving technologies that facilitate this kind
of approach to business are absolutely critical. Without them, we'd
have great ideas but no way to execute them. Connectivity
(32:24):
is crucial for Toyota, but I think it's safe to
say it's importance is evident across all industries. With solutions
like five G opening up new ways to achieve connectivity,
we're headed toward a very exciting future. Make sure you
join us for the next episode of The Restless Ones
as we continue to speak with the leaders who are
(32:45):
bringing the future into the present. I'm Jonathan Strickland. These days,
new ways of working have become the norm, and the
status oh no longer cuts it when it comes to
helping businesses evolve and grow. That's why T Mobile for
Business uses unconventional thinking to help businesses sees innovation only.
(33:10):
T Mobile offers America's largest and fastest five gene network,
which makes their new WFX solutions possible, letting businesses stay
connected and productive where work happens. See what T Mobile
for Business can do for you at t mobile dot com.
Slash Unconventional Open Signal awarded T mobile fastest five G
network based on average speeds. USA five G User Experience Report, January.
(33:33):
Capable device required coverage not available in some areas. Some
users may require certain plann or feature see t mobile
dot com
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