Brian Kursar is group vice president, Digital Technology at Toyota Motor North America (TMNA), as well as chief technology officer (CTO) of TMNA and Toyota Connected North America (TCNA) and chief data officer of TMNA. He also serves on the board of directors for TCNA and is a committee member on the Global Digital Transformation Technology and Software First steering committees, serving with members from Toyota Motor Corporation (TMC), TMNA, TCNA, Woven Planet, Toyota Systems, and Toyota Coniq.

As group vice president and CTO, Digital Technology, Kursar is responsible for driving global digital transformation and technology modernization strategy, aligned with software and cloud-first principles. This includes the adoption of a data-driven culture across Toyota divisions and companies, to facilitate innovation and transformation for Toyota, globally.

In this dual-capped role with TMNA and TCNA, he is also responsible for AI mobility services, telematics safety and convenience services, UX and digital cockpit software engineering, data science platforms, infrastructure, and software engineering practices, providing leadership and strategy for TMNA digital transformation across multiple facets of the business.

Since beginning his journey with Toyota in 2002, Kursar has served in a number of technology positions across vehicle supply chain, enterprise architecture, data engineering, advanced analytics, product quality, incentives, social media, R&D, and customer domains, having delivered the first big data platform at Toyota Motor Sales in 2013, and the first Data Science and Advanced Analytics practice in 2015, to support the Customer 360 company-wide initiative.

Kursar left Toyota in 2015 to join Warner Bros (WB) as vice president of Data Strategy and Architecture, to drive digital transformation and adoption of a data-driven culture. He led strategy and delivery in building out big data and AI capabilities in the Ad/Mar Tech space for the WB Consumer Intelligence and Advertising Activation platform.

In 2018, Kursar returned to Toyota as vice president and chief data scientist for TCNA. In this role, he delivered Toyota’s Big Data Cloud that supports advanced connected intelligence and mobility services for North America. In 2019, Kursar was promoted to CTO of Toyota Connected. During this time, he led the software delivery for DriveLink, the first North American-owned and operated telematics platform, powering the Safety Connect and Destination Assist features in Toyota and Lexus Vehicles. This platform was also launched in both Australia and India and is planned to be deployed to the European market in 2023.

Kursar joined the Global Mobility Management committee in 2020, consisting of members across TMC Connected Company, Mobility as a Service (MaaS) division, Toyota Connected Japan, TMNA, Toyota Motor Europe, and Toyota Connected Europe. In this role, he leads software engineering and delivery of the MSPF Next Platform that powers connected mobility and intelligence services for North America, Australia, Europe, and Japan. These services help enable connected and sharing capabilities to Toyota vehicles, globally.

Kursar has contributed to six granted and 18 pending technology patents for Toyota in the Connected, Mobility, Safety, Natural Language Understanding (NLU), and Customer Advanced Predictive Modeling domains.

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