How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crisis to ensure the organisation’s resilience?

At Bosch Romania, ensuring organisational resilience during instability or crisis is fundamentally rooted in a proactive, collaborative, and adaptable strategy, supported by a strong team, competitive products, and resilient leadership. Our legal team acts as a critical business partner, actively engaged in foresight and risk mitigation.

We maintain constant vigilance over the geopolitical and economic landscape, translating external challenges into actionable legal insights for our leadership. This includes closely monitoring legislative changes, trade policies, the implications for existing contractual obligations and force majeure events and potential shifts in litigation and dispute risks that could impact our operations, particularly within the dynamic automotive and industrial sectors. For instance, the ongoing transformations in the automotive industry require our legal support to be agile and responsive to evolving market and customer demands, such as the realignment of our mobility division and the push towards electromobility.

Our resilience is also built on a foundation of strong internal collaboration. We work hand-in-hand with our management and various departments – from R&D to manufacturing and sales – to ensure legal frameworks support strategic objectives while safeguarding the company. This collaborative spirit, often exemplified by our strong, resilient leadership team, ensures that legal considerations are integrated early into decision-making, enabling us to adapt quickly to unforeseen circumstances. The strength of our team lies in its collective expertise and commitment, fostering an environment where challenges are met with informed, united action. This allows Bosch to remain committed to the Romanian market and continue investing in growth areas and future technologies, even in challenging environments.

Given the current geopolitical shifts and growing uncertainties around international free trade, has your company’s risk profile evolved, and are you taking measures to address these challenges?

Absolutely, Bosch’s risk profile has significantly evolved due to current geopolitical shifts and uncertainties in international free trade. The fragmentation of the global economy, increasing geopolitical tensions, and trade conflicts directly impact global supply chains and market access, necessitating a dynamic and multifaceted response from our side. At Bosch, we are aware of these challenges and are implementing comprehensive measures to address them. Our strategy, therefore, involves a concerted effort to enhance resilience and adaptability. We are actively working on supply chain diversification and localisation, striving to reduce reliance on single-source suppliers and distant, potentially volatile, sources, and fostering localised ecosystems for critical components, mirroring Europe’s strategic focus on semiconductors and batteries. Our production units in Romania, such as Cluj and Blaj, exemplify how we build this resilience regionally.

Concurrently, we maintain proactive legal and policy engagement, continuously monitoring global trade policies and regulatory changes, particularly those impacting our key markets like the EU, US, and China. Furthermore, we leverage regional strengths and collaboration, utilising the rapidly developing ecosystem for automotive software development, engineering, and cost-effective manufacturing in regions like Romania to enhance our global competitiveness and reduce specific regional dependencies.

The collaboration between Germany and Romania stands as a prime example of building a resilient European ecosystem. Finally, Bosch continues to invest heavily in R&D and future-oriented technologies like electromobility and hydrogen, which are inherently less susceptible to geopolitical disruptions and perfectly align with our global sustainability goals. This forward-looking investment strategy aims to create more resilient business models, ensuring that these comprehensive measures not only mitigate immediate risks but also build a more robust and adaptable global operational structure capable of navigating future uncertainties.

AI has been taken seriously as a potentially revolutionary technological change in the legal world for a number of years now. Has it had a meaningful impact on how your legal team works in this time?

Indeed, AI is having a meaningful and increasingly impactful influence on how the Bosch legal team operates, aligning perfectly with Bosch’s broader strategic focus on Artificial Intelligence as a key technology. We genuinely see AI not merely as a tool for efficiency, but rather as a transformative element used to significantly enhance our legal services across the board. Bosch regards AI as absolutely critical to making our products better and substantially increasing productivity throughout the company, and this forward-thinking philosophy extends directly into the operations of our legal department. While we acknowledge that we are still in the early stages of full integration, we are actively exploring and implementing various AI solutions designed to streamline numerous legal processes. For instance, AI-powered tools are proving invaluable in helping us conduct legal research far more efficiently, enabling us to identify relevant precedents, regulations, and crucial clauses much faster than traditional methods, thereby allowing our team to dedicate more valuable time to strategic analysis and counseling. Similarly, AI capably assists us in reviewing contracts for key terms, ensuring compliance, and pinpointing potential risks; this capability significantly accelerates our review cycles, improves overall accuracy, and ensures consistency across a multitude of agreements, which is especially vital given the sheer volume and inherent complexity of legal documents within a global enterprise like Bosch.

Furthermore, by adeptly analysing large datasets, AI empowers us to identify patterns and potential compliance risks that might otherwise be missed through manual processes, a proactive approach that strengthens our ability to mitigate legal exposure, particularly in areas such as purchasing and regulatory compliance. Finally, AI also plays a crucial role in supporting the organisation and accessibility of our extensive legal knowledge base, making it considerably easier for team members to efficiently find information and effectively leverage past experience. Bosch’s substantial investment in AI and its extensive application across all product categories means that our legal team must also continuously evolve to fully understand and expertly manage the legal implications arising from these technologies. Ultimately, our overarching goal is to leverage AI to enhance our effectiveness, consistently provide more strategic advice, and ensure that our legal services remain as innovative and robust as Bosch’s cutting-edge products.