Ford Motor Company Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference 2026

Okay, great. Thank you everybody for joining. My name is Mark Delaney, and I have the pleasure of covering Ford for Goldman Sachs. I am very pleased to have with me again this year, Mike Aragon. He is the President of Integrated Services.

Thanks for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having us back.

Appreciate it. Well, as many of you know, Ford is one of the leading auto companies globally, about $190 billion of annual revenue.

Ford's auto business reports in three segments, Ford Blue, which is the segment for consumer ICE and hybrid vehicles, Ford Model e, which is Ford's consumer EV products business, and then Ford Pro, which is the company's business for commercial and government customers across powertrains. Mike, of course, leads the integrated services effort, so wanted to start there. Mike, you have been in that role for about a year. How has the software and digital services strategy evolved over that time, and what have you learned that has shaped the strategy?

Yeah, so I would say that there is two big shifts in terms of how we have been thinking about our digital products across Ford, and the first shift was really around moving from a collection of individual products to more of a connected system. When I got to Ford, the way we had structured our go-to-market and our product teams is we all focused on specific products to go to market. BlueCruise had a team, FPI, Ford Pro Intelligence had a team. That made a lot of sense at the time because these products are obviously very different from each other and we wanted to build a ton of momentum to get there. But there were a couple of things that I was pretty excited about when I got to Ford a year ago that, just from coming from the consumer product side, that were real tells for potential success.

One was an install base of active customers that was growing. That was great. An app that was gaining a lot of usage on a daily basis, not just for simple features, but customers were using it more and more as a daily habit, which is a benefit. We were getting a lot better with vehicle health data and being able to take those learnings and apply it to help our customers' experiences get better over time. I felt by not looking at it more as a cohesive system, we were leaving a lot of value on the table for our customers. That's the first step, is connecting those dots for our customers so that the product feels like it's getting better for them over time, and that it feels like one cohesive thing.

The second shift leans into one of Jim Farley's edicts around no boring vehicles. For us, that means building no boring digital products as well. The philosophy that we brought in when we think about this is we look at customer behaviors and how they use our products, and there are four main pillars of how our customers interact with the Ford ecosystem. That would be hardware and software together, and that's build, thrill, adventure, and elevate. Just to give you a sense of what that means in plain English, a couple of months ago, I was out in the middle of nowhere. I was in Quartzsite, Arizona, doing a Gemba, which is just being with our customers and learning about the processes and how they use our services, and was there with F-150 Raptor enthusiasts and Bronco enthusiasts. The conversation wasn't around hardware or software specifically.

It was around using our mapping application, onX, so that we can trail map and connect with friends and make sure that we are flagging potential issues in the trail. It was about the importance of connectivity, especially out in the middle of nowhere for this adventure cohort that we were talking to. It's also about how we were using Pro Power Onboard and using it for all the equipment that we had with us on the site. For us, it's not about generic products. It's really about building a software layer on top of the vehicles that our customers already love and that they do amazing things, and it's making that feel like it's one system.

Very interesting. Well, you talked about a recurring flywheel for this business.

Yep. Can you talk more about Ford's flywheel for those that may not be familiar?

Yeah. So for us, the flywheel's composed of four components. It's scale, activate, engage, and monetize. There's a lot of different definitions that companies use for flywheels. For us, it just means a series of actions that you can take that should compound over time. It starts with scale, and that's scaling the amazing hardware base of 14 million vehicles that are connected and customers are using on a daily basis. It's about making sure that we have the right hardware, digital hardware, to enable digital solutions like BlueCruise or connectivity, and making sure that it's for the right customers at the right time. The second piece of that is activation.

One of the important elements that we've seen in our data is that you've got to leverage that opportunity when the customer's at the dealer to get them activated into the service, get them on the app. Because that app is becoming a much stronger conduit for us to be able to connect hardware, software, and then the service platform through our dealers. It's about getting them the education that they need to know that they've got all of these great digital products and to use them, because we know that early usage leads to a lot higher engagement, which is the third part of the flywheel, engagement. The philosophy we have with that is we want to make sure that we are delivering indispensable experiences. We're upgrading a lot over time.

OTAs is becoming a much more important part of what we do and focus for us because we want the products to feel fresh to our customers and to engage them. We focus a lot on engagement because my team is focused mostly on leading metrics, and we see engagement as a leading metric into the future. If we just focused on subscriptions, that's more of a rearview looking thing. It's great because it generates revenue. But the mentality that we have is let's focus on leading metrics, and if we focus on those right leading metrics, it's going to lead to the outputs like revenue and subscriptions that we want. I think we talked a little bit about this last year, but you know that I spent a little bit of time at Amazon.

I was at Twitch. We were an important part of the Amazon ecosystem. The reason why I am bringing that up is just because at Amazon, we knew with mathematical certainty that if you were a shopper and your shopping started to taper off, and you were only using the two-day shipping, that you were probably going to churn out. But if you were a shopper, you were using that entitlement, but you were also using your Twitch entitlement to get Fortnite loot for your kids, or you are watching movies on Amazon Prime, that you tended to be a lot stickier. On top of that, you spent a lot more money. Your LTV went up. It is early innings, but we are starting to see a similar behavior and pattern at Ford.