April 24 - Franziska (Fran) Bell, Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer

Dr. Franziska "Fran" Bell is Ford’s Chief Digital & Artificial Intelligence (AI) Officer. Known for her cross-industry experience and expertise in scaling artificial intelligence (AI) and data platforms, she has led major AI teams at companies spanning the automotive, energy, and tech sectors.

Appointed to her position at Ford in January 2025, Dr. Bell is responsible for leading the company's enterprise-wide efforts to leverage data and AI. In this role, she focuses on:

• Driving business value: Bell's work is centered on partnering with the business to generate tangible value at scale.
• Improving user experiences: She guides her teams to use data and AI to enhance the overall customer experience.
• Developing human-AI teams: She advocates for a collaborative approach where AI and data are used to augment human ingenuity, automating repetitive tasks to allow engineers and designers to focus on strategic thinking and innovation.

Before joining Ford, she served as Chief Technology Officer at BP, where she was responsible for a global organization of over 4,000 people. Her mandates included software engineering, data, AI, analytics, and design across the company. As the head of Data Science Platforms at Uber, she founded and led multiple data science teams. Her work involved applying machine learning to improve a range of products and services, including system anomaly detection, forecasting, and customer support. At Toyota Research Institute (TRI) she directed AI research focused on advancing materials science and machine-assisted cognition.  Dr. Bell conducted postdoctoral research in approximate quantum dynamics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). She earned her doctorate in theoretical chemistry from the University of California, and also a degree from the University of York, where she gravitated toward computational chemistry.