Alfons Pfaller
Co-Founder & CTO, AIORX

Alfons Pfaller is an executive technology leader and Co-Founder of AIORX with more than 20 years of experience in automotive software, E/E architecture, and Software-Defined Vehicles. He held senior leadership positions at AUDI, BMW, and CARIAD, where he led large-scale software programs, global engineering organizations, and software platform development. 
At CARIAD, he led the turnaround of one of the automotive industry's largest software transformation programs, bringing it successfully into series production together with cross-brand teams from Audi and Porsche. He subsequently led group-wide platform development and the Software-Defined Vehicle program NOVA, shaping next-generation SDV concepts by combining E/E architecture, software platform strategy, and semiconductor-driven system design in collaboration with international partners. 
Today, as Co-Founder and CTO of AIORX, he is building an AI-based methodology and analytics platform that helps organizations better understand, manage, and scale large, complex software-defined products and platforms. AIORX helps reduce integration complexity, shorten development cycles, and improve the quality and stability of software-defined systems across automotive and other software-intensive industries. 

[Startup-Pitch]  Software-Defined Systems at Human Limits: A New Approach to System Understanding 

AI is fundamentally changing software engineering. Within the next few years, AI will generate and modify a significant share of the software that powers SDVs. While this promises unprecedented gains in development speed, AI also offers enormous potential to build more robust, higher-quality systems. 

The automotive industry is already struggling with growing software complexity and increasingly distributed architectures, resulting in ever more challenging system integration. As AI accelerates software creation and enables increasingly sophisticated functionality, the challenge shifts from building software to mastering its complexity. The question is no longer how to write more code, but how to understand the systems we create. AI, therefore, is not only part of the challenge - it must also become part of the solution. 

Drawing on more than 20 years of experience leading some of the automotive industry's largest software transformation programmes, Alfons Pfaller argues that the next competitive advantage will not come from writing software faster, but from understanding complex software-defined systems better. He explains why AI must evolve beyond a coding assistant into an engineering capability that helps organisations understand, manage, and scale highly complex software-defined systems - and how this thinking led to the foundation of AIORX Technology.