Ahmed Mahmoud ’87 ’90 arrives at the General Motors Information Technology (GM IT) Innovation Center in Austin each day by 6:30 a.m. at the latest. He was once in the office so early that the lights in the building switched off while he was setting up for a conference call. After that, maintenance workers set his floor on an earlier timer schedule from the rest of the building.

It’s not that Mahmoud is a natural early bird. He isn’t. Rather, he believes that often the hardest path is the best one. This is the reason he studied physics in school—his brother told him it was the most difficult subject. It’s the reason he believes in pivoting away from the offshoring model that most IT companies make paramount in their hiring. And it’s the reason he is part of the team transforming innovation at GM as the chief information officer of four major units: Global Manufacturing, Customer Care & Aftersales, Global Purchasing & Supply Chain, and Quality IT.

No Safety Net

Born in Libya, Mahmoud is the son of a former diplomat. He spent much of his early life living abroad and attending American schools in places as diverse as Greece, Egypt, Switzerland and Malaysia.

“I was an expat my whole life,” he explained. “All of my formal education was in English. I never had any formal education in Arabic, and although I can speak the language fluently, I can’t read or write it.”

When it came time for Mahmoud’s father to return to Libya with his family in 1981, Mahmoud decided to finish high school in Texas. He completed his junior year at Texas Military Institute in San Antonio, then transferred to Huntsville High School for his senior year since his two older brothers were attending Sam Houston State University (SHSU). Following in their footsteps, Mahmoud also completed his first two years of college at SHSU before transferring in 1985 to the physics program at Texas A&M University. He received his physics degree in 1987, and that same year began a doctoral program in nuclear physics—also at Texas A&M. He worked hard as a student, and the stakes were high.

“There’s no safety net as a foreign student,” he said. “If you flunk out of school, there’s no scholastic probation where you can go home and spend time with your parents. If you fail, your visa is revoked and you have to leave the United States.”

Mahmoud’s professors saw great potential in him, but geopolitical forces out of his control interfered with his trajectory. During the summer after his first year in the graduate program, while other students took internships at national labs, Mahmoud faced a harsh reality: Libyan nuclear theoretical physicists during the Cold War didn’t have the same access to national research labs as their American peers.

“In the early 1980s, President Ronald Reagan made it so Libyans couldn’t work in national labs as physicists,” Mahmoud explained. “That was the first time in my life that I felt like an outsider. It made me suddenly ask myself if I really needed to go further in the field of physics.”

Facing this roadblock, Mahmoud earned his master’s degree in physics instead of a Ph.D., completing the program in 1990. When he prepared to enter the workforce, he discovered that courses he had taken outside of his major—math and computer science—would ultimately be the key to his future. He was hired at a research institute at the University of Houston to work on computer-aided drug design. With this decision, Mahmoud began a lifelong career working in IT, moving on to positions at Eastman Kodak, Dell, Advanced Micro Devices, Hewlett-Packard and now General Motors.

For the last 21 years, Mahmoud has lived and worked in Austin. He joined GM in 2012, just as the company opened its first Texas-based Innovation Center.

IT Transformation

The establishment of the GM IT Innovation Center in Austin (along with facilities in Roswell, Georgia; Chandler, Arizona; and Warren, Michigan) signaled the start of a historic transformation in the way GM internally implemented information technology and services.

“Historically, the IT business sends all sorts of jobs offshore to third parties around the world, including India, China and other nations,” Mahmoud said. “One of the things we’ve done at GM is bring these jobs back into our newly established innovation centers. We went from zero to more than 2,000 jobs in Austin in the last three years.”

Not only has the job growth in Austin been significant, but GM IT overall has moved from 1,400 badged employees to more than 11,000 in the last several years. Mahmoud and other executives at the company now place emphasis on both “insourcing” jobs—in other words, hiring their own personnel for projects rather than contracting outside labor—and building the overall talent of the team.

“Instead of having people in different time zones taking 12 hours to get back to you on something, you can now get your answer in 12 minutes or 12 seconds,” Mahmoud said.

The people in charge of IT at the company are now predominantly GM employees who work at one of the four U.S. innovation centers. According to Mahmoud, GM selected these spots because they are in close proximity to an abundance of IT talent.

“Our locations and the surrounding towns about 300 to 500 miles away cover roughly 70 percent of the college-graduating population in the nation,” Mahmoud said. “A few years after school, people usually get married, have kids and start thinking about moving closer to home. These locations keep them near enough to grandma and grandpa, and we don’t lose valuable employees.”

New college hires are a valuable resource for GM. Many of the employees at the GM Austin IT Innovation Center are recent college grads, and Texas A&M is one of the schools from which the company selects its hires. But, said Mahmoud, many young people are warned to steer clear of IT because they are misinformed that most jobs are going overseas.

“Software is everywhere,” he said. “The latest lightbulbs have software in them. Look at microwave ovens, TVs and cars. The concept that all software jobs are going overseas is bad information.”

As the father of three children—22-year-old Maryam, 21-year-old Adam ’16 (a construction science major at Texas A&M) and 16-year-old Sami—Mahmoud encourages his children to explore as many subject areas as possible in their studies. He becomes frustrated when he hears parents and academic advisers urging students to avoid classes that don’t count toward their degrees.

“You go to college for an education, not just for a degree,” he tells them, thinking back to his own Texas A&M experience. “It’s like trying a new food. Taste it and see if you like it before you turn it down!”

Technology for the Future

At GM, Mahmoud runs teams totaling approximately 2,000 people, some of whom are part of the GM Vehicle Health Management initiative. They develop technology that will help predict vehicular malfunctions before they happen. The program, called Proactive Alerts, uses a combination of sensors and software to keep drivers safer.

“Let’s say the starter takes four turns to start the car, and all of a sudden it’s beginning to take more energy,” said Mahmoud. “This tells me that the battery will start degrading, and within X number of weeks, the battery will go out.”