BMW to Replace 20% of Management Roles With AI

BMW has announced a restructuring programme that will cut the number of its divisions and associated management roles by 20% and replace them with “agentic AI applications” by 2028.

The plan was set out in a BMW press release at the end of September 2026 and presented at BMW Group’s Capital Market Day. BMW has used artificial intelligence in production and other operations since 2023, including AI agents for monitoring geopolitical risks, product quality and cost cutting. The changes are scheduled to be implemented during 2027 and completed by 2028.

The AI applications are planned to cover development, purchasing from suppliers, sales and aftersales. BMW said that, in its current phase, people still make final decisions and that AI outputs used in vehicle development are monitored, reviewed and approved by developers. The carmaker has an ongoing collaboration with Mistral AI.

BMW’s stated targets are annual savings of about €1bn by 2028, an interim EBIT margin of 3–5%, and a return to its long-term 8–10% EBIT margin range by the start of 2030. These are forecasts, not achieved results. A voluntary severance scheme has been offered to around 40,000 workers, and BMW’s HR portal was briefly overwhelmed by traffic on launch day. BMW has described some of the agentic AI systems as “colleagues”.

The announcement did not specify which decisions the AI systems would make, how they would be validated, what would happen if they are wrong, or who would be accountable for errors. These questions remain open, and the potential for AI errors to affect future products is a speculative risk rather than a confirmed event.