Automotive News Europe honors the 2026 Rising Stars

The people shaping CRM at the world's largest automakers are not 20-year veterans coasting on institutional knowledge — they're early-career operators who grew up watching legacy systems fail in real time.

Automotive News Europe just named their 2026 Rising Stars. One of them owns CRM at Stellantis. Another is leading digital transformation at Audi. These aren't honorary titles — these organizations handed serious operational responsibility to people who think differently about how customer data should actually work.

That matters for you. The automotive industry runs on dealership networks, complex customer lifecycles, and sales teams that have zero patience for software that slows them down. If the people fixing CRM at Stellantis and Audi are younger operators with fresh instincts — not consultants billing by the hour — it says something about where the real progress is coming from.

The lesson isn't that you need younger staff. It's that the people closest to the daily friction are the ones who actually know what needs to change — and the organizations winning right now are the ones giving those people the tools to act on it quickly.

The best CRM decisions don't come from the top of the org chart; they come from whoever is stuck doing the workarounds every single day.

#CRM #SalesOperations #AutomotiveIndustry #MidMarket #OperationsLeadership

Original Source

- Stellantis - CRM. Mirjam Abel - Audi - Digital. Stan De Potter - Toyota Europe - Energy Business. Ibrahim Mohand-Kaci - Renault Group - Engineering.