Director, AI & Emerging Technologies · BorgWarner
Enterprise AI, engineered to be trusted.
I lead AI at BorgWarner, a global automotive technology manufacturer, from Enterprise IT. I support functions such as engineering, manufacturing, finance and quality with the strategy, the governance, the platform and the agents, and with the harder part: getting them into production. On my own time I build agentic tools in the open, so I know where the hard parts are.
At work
- 15+
- AI enterprise scaled projects delivered
- $1M+
- realised hard savings a year from replacing or building enterprise SaaS
- $1M
- saved in 2025 by optimising engineering software licences and usage
- 16,000+
- engineers served by the global engineering platforms I led
In the lab
- 5
- open-source agent and engineering projects shipped
- 10
- open models benchmarked for agent tool use on my own GPU server
- 10M+
- vehicles running software from an architecture language I wrote
AI transformation
Seven things have to be true before AI scales.
Most AI programmes stall between the pilot and production. The model is rarely the reason. These seven pillars are how I think about the rest. I helped create them as our framework for AI adoption and governance, and I use them to decide what to fund, what to fix and what to stop.
01
Governance
Who decides, what gets approved, and the evidence we keep. Aligned with the EU AI Act and ISO/IEC 42001.
Good looks like: Every use case has an owner, a risk rating and evidence on file before it reaches production.
First move: Stand up a use-case registry and a simple risk triage.
02
Strategy
Where AI changes the economics of the business, function by function, and what we will not do.
Good looks like: A short list of bets tied to business outcomes, reviewed every quarter, with a clear not-doing list.
First move: Map where AI changes the cost of work in each function.
03
Reference architecture
One way to build: models, data, agents and integration, so every team is not starting from zero.
Good looks like: Teams build on shared, approved patterns for models, data, agents and integration.
First move: Publish three patterns: chat over documents, agent with tools, batch extraction.
04
Toolbox
The approved tools and services, from copilots to agent platforms, with clear guidance on which to use when.
Good looks like: People know which approved tool fits which job, and every shadow tool has a better alternative.
First move: Publish an approved list with a when-to-use guide.
05
Harness
The paved road. Templates, reference code, pipelines and ready environments, so the safe path is also the fast one.
Good looks like: A team goes from idea to governed pilot in days, using templates and ready environments.
First move: Ship one starter template with logging, evaluation and deployment wired in.
06
Training and enablement
Getting thousands of people from curious to capable, with role-specific paths rather than one generic course.
Good looks like: Role-based learning paths, from executives to engineers, with adoption you can measure.
First move: Start with managers. They decide whether their teams experiment.
07
Communication
Telling people what is happening, why, and where to find things. Adoption fails quietly without it.
Good looks like: People know what is happening, where to find things and how to propose a use case.
First move: One front door: a page and a channel for everything AI.
- Try it
Score your company on all seven
A ten-minute self-assessment with a radar chart, your biggest gaps and a printable one-page report.
Start the assessment →
Agentic AI
Agents are easy to demo and hard to run.
A single agent in a notebook is a weekend. Hundreds of agents working across a company, calling real systems, with someone accountable for each one, is a platform. This is the stack I build toward, at work and in my own experiments.
- 01
Gateway
One front door for every model call. Routing, cost control, keys and quotas in one place.
- 02
Evaluation and observability
Every prompt, tool call and answer is traced, and quality is tested on every change, not once at launch.
- 03
Governance and risk registry
Each use case and agent is registered, risk-rated and owned by a named person.
- 04
Agent runtime
Where agents run, isolated from each other, with permissions they cannot talk their way out of.
- 05
Orchestration
Agents that plan, hand work to each other and call tools, coordinated rather than hard-wired.
- 06
MCP and A2A
Standard connections. MCP to reach enterprise systems, A2A so agents from different vendors can work together.
Flagship project
Sylang. The engineering platform I wish I had for twenty years.
At Continental I wrote an architecture language that ended up generating ASIL-D software in more than 10 million vehicles. It worked because it forced traceability. Sylang is what I would build now that AI can do the typing: an AI-native platform for engineering safety-critical products, from requirements to tests.
One connected model
Requirements, architecture, product variants, safety analysis and tests live together, so every change shows what else it touches.
Agents as colleagues
AI agents read and write the same data as engineers, under the same reviews and the same audit trail.
Your data platform
It runs on the data platform a company already owns, instead of becoming one more silo to integrate.
Built for audits
ISO 26262, DO-178C and IEC 62304 are first-class, so the evidence is a by-product of the work.
Writing
Notes from making enterprise AI real.
- Two locks on a static siteThis site is static, but it has a private studio where I write and keep documents. It is guarded twice: once at the edge by an identity service, and again inside the code by checking the signed token myself. Why one lock is not enough, and the ten tests that prove the second one.
- Zero inline scripts, and the six things that broke on the wayThis site runs under a Content Security Policy that only allows scripts from its own files. Getting there took six fixes, most of them in places I did not expect: the build tool, a syntax highlighter, a page-turn library and a diagram renderer.
- Turning a web page into a book: pagination, page turns and fullscreenMy book is HTML. I wanted it to read like a book: real pages, a page turn, fullscreen that survives the next chapter, and a front page you can always get back to. How the reader measures pages in the browser, and what it costs.
- An AI harness that can't lie quietlyYou cannot stop a language model from inventing a fact. You can build the harness around it so that an invented fact has nowhere to hide. The design of the small, private AI editor I use for documents that must stay true.
- Editing 80,000 words: volume in parallel, correctness by machine, judgment by meHow I ran a full reader-first edit of a 17-chapter technical book with AI agents, without losing a code sample or a diagram. One brief, nine batches, a validator that compares every file against the original, and a human read at the end.
Career
Two decades in safety-critical systems. Now, enterprise AI.
- 2026 to now
Director, AI & Emerging Technologies
BorgWarner
Leads AI from Enterprise IT for a global automotive technology manufacturer, supporting functions such as engineering, manufacturing, SG&A, finance and quality.
- 2024 to 2026
Director, Enterprise Engineering Systems
BorgWarner
The global engineering application estate for 16,000+ engineers, from requirements to CAD, CAE and test, including product line engineering. Applied AI to licence and usage optimisation, saving $1M in 2025; built an enterprise MCP layer for engineering tools.
- 2022 to 2024
Director, Systems & Safety Engineering
Luminar Technologies
Built a global systems and safety engineering organisation from scratch for automotive LiDAR.
- 2007 to 2022
Head of Platform Engineering & System Design
Continental Automotive
Authored the architecture language behind ASIL-D braking and automated-driving software in 10M+ vehicles. Led engineering across the US, Mexico and Germany.
- 2004 to 2007
Software Engineer
Infosys
Embedded automotive software for Continental, in India and Germany.
Lab
Building tools for the boring half of AI.
Open-source work on agents, isolation, interoperability and evidence, built on my own time.
- AkelaAgent orchestration with skill routing and an outbound-only adapter, so agents stay behind the firewall.
- Hermes StudioBrowser IDE for agents with kernel-isolated workspaces. Real process isolation, not isolation by prompt. MIT-licensed.
- hermes-adapterSidecar that makes an agent speak proper A2A JSON-RPC, so it can be registered in enterprise agent platforms.
- JotXLocal-first knowledge hub that syncs to your own Google Drive or OneDrive. No JotX account, no JotX servers.
Contact
Let’s talk.
I like hearing from people working on enterprise AI, AI governance, agentic platforms or safety-critical engineering, and from anyone looking for a speaker or a writer on those subjects.
- Email[email protected]
- LinkedInin/balajiboominathan
- GitHub@balaji-embedcentrum
- WritingRSS feed