GM loses chief AI officer after 8 months in role created for him – Detroit Free Press

Barak Turovsky, General Motors’ first ever chief artificial intelligence officer, has left the company, according to a post on LinkedIn, the second major departure of a Silicon Valley alum from the automaker in recent weeks.
The Detroit automaker had hired Turosvsky for a newly created role. GM said on March 3 that he came with 25 years of artificial intelligence experience, most recently serving as vice president of AI at Cisco. 
“Friends, I just wanted to share that as of today I am no longer with GM. Physical AI is just as exciting as LLMs (large language models) and it was a genuine pleasure to work again with brilliant folks like John Anderson, Davey Weissberg, John Richardson, and many others,” Turovsky’s LinkedIn post read. “I will be taking a little sabbatical to work on some exciting new ideas. I look forward to catching up with everyone during the upcoming holiday season and stay tuned!”
Physical AI refers to a system that allows autonomous technologies like cameras, robots or self-driving cars to make decisions in a three-dimensional space.
GM confirmed Nov. 22 that Turovsky elected to depart and that his team will now report to manufacturing engineering. 
“We are strategically integrating AI capabilities directly into our business and product organizations, enabling faster innovation and more targeted solutions,” GM spokesperson Chaiti Sen said in an emailed statement.
Turovsky worked out of GM’s Mountain View Technical Center in California, which opened last year. He also previously held leadership roles at Google as head of product for languages artificial intelligence. 
“In this newly created role, he will take GM’s AI roadmap to the next level, setting the vision and strategy for AI at GM and how it impacts everything from (autonomous vehicle technology) to enterprise logistics to manufacturing,” GM said in a statement at the time of his hiring. 
Turovsky reported directly to Dave Richardson, GM’s senior vice president of software and services engineering, who departed the company on Oct. 31 ― one week after appearing onstage at a media event in New York to outline the company’s software-defined strategies. The former Apple exec started at the company in 2023 to overhaul its software department. He, too, was based in California.
Both departures come as GM’s software is poised to be a major profit driver for GM. The company expects it to generate as much as $25 billion in revenue by 2030.
At the New York event on Oct. 22, GM executives said the company was on the cusp of eyes-free driving and a unified software platform for its vehicles, two long-awaited initiatives the automaker poured billions of dollars into achieving, making significant advancements thanks to progress in artificial intelligence.
“We’re changing the structure of the Software and Services Engineering team to accelerate how we develop and deliver technology experiences to our customers and the company,” GM spokesman Kevin Kelly shared in a statement at the time of Richardson’s departure. “David Richardson has elected to step down from his role at GM, and we thank him for his contributions.”
GM’s Chief Product Officer Sterling Anderson oversees the majority of GM’s software and services engineering team to better align with product development, GM said on Oct. 31.
Some of the operations previously under Richardson’s purview — cybersecurity, IT and data engineering — will temporarily report to CEO Mary Barra.
(This story has been updated to include new information.)
Jackie Charniga covers General Motors for the Free Press. Reach her at jcharniga@freepress.com.

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