AI ambitions are growing faster than legacy infrastructure can keep up: Gangadhar Reddy Yasam, Ford Motor Company

As automotive manufacturers accelerate their shift toward AI, analytics, and software-defined vehicles, a less visible but far more complex challenge is coming into focus. Legacy infrastructure is being pushed far beyond what it was originally designed to handle. Platforms built a decade or more ago, engineered for stability and long lifecycles, are now expected to support GPU-intensive workloads, real-time data processing, and distributed edge architectures.

For Ford Motor Company, this challenge is not theoretical. It plays out daily across a vast and fragmented operational footprint spanning APAC, the Middle East, and Africa. According to Gangadhar Reddy Yasam, Head of IT Infrastructure & Data Centre Engineering and Strategy for APAC and MEA, the hardest part of digital transformation is no longer applications or connectivity, but the foundational platforms that sit underneath them.

“On the infrastructure side, things have evolved quite drastically over the last few years,” says Reddy ...