An air conditioner is an agreeable machine. You notice it when it fails, complain about the bill when it succeeds, and rarely ask who runs the company that made it. David Gitlin has built his recent career around the considerable business hidden inside that indifference. At Carrier, the equipment has become the starting point for a larger question: how much of a building’s energy use can one company help its owner manage?
That question represents quite a journey for an executive who spent more than two decades in aerospace. Gitlin became Carrier’s chief executive in June 2019, before its separation from United Technologies. He inherited a familiar industrial name with an assortment of businesses. He has since bought, sold and reorganized his way toward a more concentrated company. The machinery behind the machinery has received a thorough inspection.
A résumé with several sets of tools
Gitlin’s education resists a tidy professional label. He earned a bachelor’s degree at Cornell, a law degree at the University of Connecticut and an MBA at MIT Sloan. These are three different ways of asking questions: what can be understood, what can be defended, and what can be made to work commercially. His subsequent career would require plenty of the third, with ample occasion for the other two.
At Hamilton Sundstrand, his responsibilities included power systems, aircraft programs and business development. The names attached to those jobs - Pratt & Whitney, Rolls-Royce and General Electric - put him close to customers whose purchases involved long relationships and exacting requirements. He later led UTC Aerospace Systems, then became president and chief operating officer of Collins Aerospace. Combining businesses was part of his working life well before Carrier.
The sequence matters because Gitlin arrived at air conditioning with an industrial operator’s background. He had worked with complicated products, large organizations and customers who needed equipment to keep performing after delivery. Moving from aircraft systems to buildings changed the destination of the hardware. It left plenty of familiar questions about engineering, production, service and the person accountable when something went wrong.
Independence comes with its own paperwork
Carrier became an independent public company in April 2020. For Gitlin, the appointment and the separation were distinct steps: first running a business inside a parent company, then answering for a company with its own shareholders and board. The distinction can sound like a detail reserved for lawyers. In practice, it changes who makes the decisions, who finances them and where responsibility finally lands.
His appointment was part of United Technologies’ plan to establish Carrier and Otis as separate public companies. Greg Hayes, then UTC’s chairman and chief executive, announced Gitlin and Judy Marks as the leaders of the future independent businesses. Gitlin’s assignment therefore began with a particular challenge: prepare an established operation to act on its own. A long corporate history would provide experience; it would also provide habits.
In April 2021, Gitlin added the chairmanship. The combined roles put him at the center of both management and board leadership. The public-company chapter also gave the business a more visible scorecard. Product development, service revenue and operating decisions now fed into a company whose results investors could examine directly, without the surrounding collection of aerospace and other operations.
Gitlin’s own account divides the work into stages. First came the foundation, including culture and operating practices. Then came a change in the portfolio. Execution followed. It is a useful sequence precisely because the words are unglamorous. An acquisition makes an announcement. A working organization requires people to know what to do on the following Tuesday.
“This is a new lease on life.”David Gitlin, describing Carrier’s independence
The purchase that changed the address book
The decisive expansion arrived in January 2024, when Carrier completed its acquisition of Viessmann Climate Solutions. The German business brought heating expertise and a substantial European residential and light-commercial presence. It also brought approximately 12,000 employees. Corporate strategy, at that scale, means many thousands of people discovering that the organization chart above them has changed.
One especially useful part of Viessmann’s business was its direct relationship with installers. A heating system reaches a home through people who select it, fit it and return when it needs attention. Buying the manufacturer also meant gaining that route to the customer. The transaction widened Carrier’s geographic position while bringing it closer to the people who turn a catalogue of products into a functioning installation.
The financing made the relationship more durable than a simple exchange of a business for cash. Carrier’s filing recorded €10.2 billion in cash and 58,608,959 Carrier shares as the purchase consideration. The precision is almost comically resistant to a neat headline. It also reveals the arrangement: the seller received a meaningful continuing interest in the buyer’s future, alongside the cash.
Max Viessmann joined Carrier’s board. For Gitlin, the deal therefore involved a continuing connection with the family name on the acquired equipment. The task went beyond putting another brand in a presentation. Carrier needed to retain the engineering capability, installer relationships and commercial knowledge that had made the business worth acquiring in the first place.
There was a substantial exit on the other side. In June 2024, Carrier completed the sale of Global Access Solutions to Honeywell for an enterprise value of $4.95 billion. Carrier expected roughly $4 billion in net proceeds and said it intended to use them to reduce debt. Selling a security business helped finance the reshaping of a climate business. The balance sheet had a vote in the strategy.
There is an instructive symmetry here. Honeywell wanted the access business for its own automation strategy. Gitlin wanted Carrier to concentrate elsewhere. Both companies could see a future for the same assets, under different owners. An executive’s conviction is often easiest to observe in what the company is prepared to let go.
A culture that has to leave the page
Gitlin calls the company’s framework The Carrier Way. In his account of the transformation, values, leadership appointments, simpler structures and continuous improvement all belong to the same effort. His argument is practical: a more focused portfolio needs an organization capable of acting on that focus. Putting the right businesses together provides the opportunity. Daily decisions determine whether anything useful happens.
One detail makes his approach unusually concrete. He has described allocating his own time with a pie chart, matching his schedule to company priorities. He also recalled an earlier Southern California assignment where a capable team needed greater latitude to improve operations. The connection is revealing: he talks about giving people room, while treating the leader’s attention as something that needs an allocation of its own.
A calendar is a fairly unforgiving management document. It records who actually received an hour, whatever the strategy presentation promised. For a chief executive overseeing engineering, factories, customers and acquisitions, deciding where to spend time is itself an operating choice. The pie chart is an appealingly ordinary instrument for a job surrounded by impressive financial instruments.
The factory meets the electricity bill
In May 2025, Carrier announced an additional $1 billion investment over five years in American manufacturing, research and workforce expansion. The plan included expanding existing facilities and building a new manufacturing site. The company expected 4,000 jobs across research, production and field service. Those were announced expectations, with work and spending still required to turn them into results.
The planned manufacturing supported heat-pump components and battery assemblies. Carrier also identified liquid cooling for data centers and battery-enabled climate technologies as areas for research. Together, these plans show the broader boundary Gitlin is drawing around the company: equipment that controls temperature, connected to systems that manage when and how electricity is used.
By January 2026, he was discussing QuantumLeap, Carrier’s data-center cooling offering, and the integration of direct-to-chip cooling with chiller systems. The digital economy has a very physical requirement to move heat. For an executive trained around industrial systems, the connection is rather convenient: all those calculations still need equipment, engineering and service somewhere outside the software.
The next factory is a test of the argument
India supplies another concrete measure of Gitlin’s ambitions. In a May 2026 interview, he described a $100 million investment in Sri City, Andhra Pradesh, with the facility intended to be operating by the end of 2027. He also set out a goal of reaching $1 billion in Indian sales by the end of the decade. These were forward plans, rather than a claim that the destination had already been reached.
His explanation emphasized making the commercial products sold in India largely within India. He also pointed to engineering and digital work in Hyderabad. That combination gives the expansion more substance than a new factory alone: design, production, supply relationships and support all have a place in the account. The local operation is meant to carry more of the customer relationship.
Gitlin’s 2026 message on sustainability connects Carrier’s direction to electrification and expanding digital infrastructure. He identifies the energy consumed by products in use as central to the company’s environmental footprint. That directs attention back to the customer’s building and electricity bill. Selling the machine is one event; the way it operates over time is a much longer commercial and engineering responsibility.
His career still has an aerospace connection. Gitlin has served on Boeing’s board since 2022, with roles on its aerospace safety and audit committees. At Carrier, however, the next chapter is being written in heating systems, energy management and cooling installations. The ambition is broad. The evidence will arrive in familiar industrial forms: equipment delivered, systems commissioned, customers returning, and plans that survive contact with the factory floor.