Runs the Silicon Valley brain of the company that invented the car. Ships voice assistants that talk back, and a steering wheel that, on the right freeway, you are allowed to let go of.
Most car-company R&D bosses come up through powertrain or chassis. Philipp Skogstad came up through a Stanford lab obsessed with how engineers actually work when nobody's watching. He wrote a dissertation about high-performance design teams - not about a transmission, not about a battery, but about the humans who build them - and then spent a decade at SAP turning that thesis into operating practice. Now he runs Mercedes-Benz R&D North America from a corporate campus tucked behind a highway off-ramp in San Jose, where roughly 830 people are quietly trying to keep the world's oldest car company ahead of the world's youngest ones.
The Mercedes pitch in 2026 is unusual. While other premium brands race for software-defined vehicles by hiring tech executives, MBRDNA has gone the other way: a German company hired a German-trained engineer who happens to have a PhD from Palo Alto. The result is a unit that talks like Stuttgart and ships like Sunnyvale.
Skogstad's brief is the polite-sounding, faintly impossible job of "all endeavours related to future and innovation topics" for Mercedes in North America. In practice: autonomous driving, MBUX infotainment, connected services, EV powertrain calibration, the ChatGPT integration that turned the steering column into a chatbot. He is the person who decides what gets prototyped here versus shipped from Germany, and which California experiments earn a seat in a production S-Class.
People want to drive change. They don't want to be changed.— Philipp Skogstad, on AI rollouts at Mercedes
The only Level 3 conditional autonomous system on US public roads with SAE-style certification. Approved first in Nevada, then California, on selected freeways under 40 mph. Skogstad's line: "we are putting a lot of technology into the vehicle to make it safer."
Mercedes was first OEM to integrate ChatGPT into its infotainment system. A beta rolled to 900,000+ vehicles. Skogstad installed the updated version in his own car after New Year's, then demoed at CES.
Less photogenic, more important. Skogstad has spent 2024–2025 retooling MBRDNA's process spine - the unglamorous work of turning a research lab into a manufacturer of shippable software.
Skogstad arrived at Stanford for a master's in mechanical engineering, then stayed for the PhD. His advisors at the Center for Design Research (CDR) ran ME310, the legendary year-long product design course that pairs corporate sponsors with international student teams. CDR is where Larry Leifer codified the empirical study of design as a discipline. Skogstad's interest fit neatly: what makes some teams ship and others spin?
He completed the doctorate in 2009. A post-doc at CDR followed. Then SAP - where he ran open innovation, headed the Silicon Valley Next Talent Program, and served as Chief of Staff to the company's Chief Design Officer (a job title that existed at very few enterprise software firms in the early 2010s). Somewhere in there he stacked an MBA from the University of St. Gallen onto a Stanford engineering pedigree and a Saint Louis University undergraduate degree. Four credentials, three countries.
The leap to Mercedes-Benz wasn't a swerve. It was the same thesis - how do you get high-performing teams to invent things that ship - applied to a company that has been inventing things that ship for 140 years.
With Level 3, we are - today - still the only ones who have an SAE-certified system out on the road.— On Drive Pilot, InsideEVs interview
Mercedes-Benz is the only OEM whose driver-assistance system is legally allowed, in two US states, to let a human take their eyes off the road. That permission was not granted on press releases. It was granted on a stack of documentation, edge-case test data, and process discipline. The body of work that produced it lives, in large part, inside Skogstad's organisation.
His operating model has a clear tell. When McKinsey asked how Mercedes was integrating generative AI without exposing customer data, he didn't pitch a moat or a model. He described an internal sandbox: give engineers a safe place to play with the technology, then let them iterate forward. Sandboxes, design thinking, fast cycles - the vocabulary of a Stanford d.school post-doc deployed inside a 140-year-old industrial company.
The cultural translation runs both directions. Skogstad's public posts hammer on "operational excellence" - a phrase rarely associated with start-up culture and very associated with German manufacturing. He is, in that sense, the rare executive equipped to defend the discipline of a global OEM to a Silicon Valley engineer, and to defend the speed of a Silicon Valley engineer to a Stuttgart board.
The CES 2024 demo of Mercedes' new ChatGPT integration ran on a version Skogstad had already installed in his own car right after New Year's. The dogfood note is the point: he wanted seat-time before the press did.
Engineer in St. Louis, mechanical engineer at Stanford, design researcher at CDR, MBA at St. Gallen. He's basically a four-discipline translator. The job he holds requires all four.
The same week he's running an automotive R&D lab in San Jose, he is advising a Japanese industrial conglomerate on AI. Two of the harder enterprise-AI problems in the world. One Rolodex.
When using ChatGPT in our cars, the data stays with Mercedes, with you and your car.— Drivers of Disruption podcast, McKinsey
Talks more about sandboxes, programs and rollouts than about features. Reads as a former chief-of-staff for good reason.
Returns, often, to the "we invented the automobile" line. It is delivered without irony - and earned. Daimler patented the first car in 1886.
The boast he keeps making is small and specific: still the only L3 certification on US roads. Vague claims he avoids. Verifiable ones he repeats.
The campus sits a short drive from Levi's Stadium and a long way - culturally - from Sindelfingen. MBRDNA also runs sites in Sunnyvale, Long Beach, Redford (Michigan) and Seattle, but the centre of gravity is here, near every supplier of autonomy-grade compute and every recruit who's ever interned at a robotaxi start-up.
The Sunnyvale outpost has long been Mercedes' window on Silicon Valley: a place to source AI talent without asking them to move to Stuttgart, and to keep an eye on the companies the OEM might one day partner with, acquire or compete against.