BlackBerry CEO John Giamatteo on powering 275M cars with QNX and why robotics is now the fastest-growing segment

BlackBerry's QNX: From Smartphones to 275 Million Cars

BlackBerry is no longer a handset company. Under CEO John Giamatteo, it operates as an embedded software and secure communications business, with QNX — its real-time operating system — running in 275 million vehicles worldwide and a team of roughly 2,000 employees and contractors based primarily in Ottawa and Waterloo.

The QNX pitch is straightforward: think of it as the Windows of the car. It sits beneath safety-critical functions — digital cockpit, ADAS, body control — across OEMs and tier-one suppliers in Germany, Japan, Korea, North America, and increasingly China, which Giamatteo flags as one of the fastest-growing markets. The company carries a $950 million backlog in QNX deployments expected to roll out over the next five to seven years.

“We're proud to be powering over 275,000,000 cars around the world today and growing millions over the years. The QNX operating system is really the operating system that powers all things that go on in the car, particularly on safety critical types of functionalities from digital cockpit to ADAS to body control. The general embedded space for us, which includes things like industrial automation, robotics, medical instrumentation — it's our fastest growing segment. It's our fastest growing pipeline.”

AI caution in a certification-heavy industry

Giamatteo is deliberately conservative about AI adoption in core development. Automotive software must meet ISO 26262, a functional safety standard that is, as he puts it, "nontrivial" to satisfy with AI-generated code. BlackBerry uses AI in testing, customer service, and go-to-market, but keeps it away from the code that goes into vehicles. The constraint is regulatory, not philosophical.

On full autonomy timelines, Giamatteo puts mass-market autopilot well into the 2030s. Of the 90 million cars produced annually, only about 25% currently carry advanced software stacks. Getting the rest to autonomous capability is a decade-long journey, not an 18-to-24-month sprint.

Robotics is now the fastest-growing segment

The more immediate growth story is industrial. Giamatteo says robotics — automated mobile robots used in pick-pack-ship logistics, surgical robotic arms in operating rooms, medical instrumentation — is now BlackBerry's fastest-growing pipeline segment. The logic mirrors automotive: any application requiring precision and certified safety levels needs a hardened OS underneath it. QNX fits that requirement across industrial verticals in the same way it does in cars.

The ecosystem model underpins both markets. NVIDIA, Qualcomm, ARM, Texas Instruments, Intel, and Bosch all integrate QNX into their own stacks before it reaches the end customer. Giamatteo says M&A is on the table if something fills a gap or accelerates a category, but organic momentum from robotics and physical AI makes acquisitions a secondary priority for now.

The brand question

After the interview, the question of whether the BlackBerry name still serves the business came up. One view is that it's an asset — enterprise buyers from the device era associated BlackBerry with deep organizational deployment, not just consumer gadgets. The counterargument is that a new generation of enterprise buyers maps the name to a lost smartphone market, not a safety-critical software platform running inside a quarter-billion cars. Giamatteo didn't address it directly, but the $950 million backlog suggests the name isn't slowing customers down much.