Juergen Schmerder

Juergen leads the Speech & Digital Assistants team at Mercedes-Benz Research & Development North America (MBRDNA) in Sunnyvale, CA, which builds software that lets Mercedes-Benz customers talk to their cars – inside of the car, through the built-in #HeyMercedes voice assistant, and outside the car through integrations with Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant.

This team has partnered with SoundHound on evolving the decades-old voice control of Mercedes-Benz cars into a full-fledged digital assistant, that can answer many questions about and also beyond the vehicle. The #HeyMercedes voice assistant premiered with the new Mercedes-Benz User Experience (MBUX) in the A-Class.

Juergen joined MBRDNA in 2018, after previously leading the Platform & APIs Product Management team for smart speaker manufacturer Sonos. After getting his German University Diploma in Math and CS many moons ago, Juergen spent 15 years at Enterprise Software vendor SAP, working on many projects such CRM, in-memory databases, developer ecosystems and cultural transformation. He also did AI when AI wasn’t cool.