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Fully autonomous vehicles (AV) may not have drivers behind the wheel, but people are still driving the industry itself. When you see a Waymo or Zoox robotaxi on the streets of San Francisco, there’s a good chance a Leavey School of Business graduate or student had something to do with getting it there.

Each Bronco has their own reason for being drawn to this emerging industry. For Johan Lundin, a current Executive MBA student, that reason is safety. He experienced bad car accidents when he was younger, then became disillusioned with how society accepts accidents and fatalities as part of driving. To him, AVs represent a chance to make the roads safer by reducing human error.

“This is a rare opportunity to work for a company that’s doing something truly meaningful for me and also be a part of a really exciting technological wave,” says Lundin, program manager of outsourced labor for Waymo, which is part of Alphabet Inc. He uses his workforce expertise to help the company manage a global team that includes contractors and vendors — everyone from mechanics to software developers

Similarly, Kruti Sanghavi, who earned a masters’s degree in information systems from Leavey in 2020, uses her systems skills to help the AV startup scale into a full-fledged operation. She interned at Waymo while she was a student and became a business systems analyst for Zoox shortly after the company was acquired by Amazon.

Sanghavi has helped Zoox develop back-end systems for everything from finance to pricing to customer relationship management. “I can help identify what’s lacking, and then make improvements to systems to help the company grow.”

DeMarco Orella, engineering operations technical specialist at Waymo, handles yet another aspect of the business. The 2018 management graduate first became interested in the industry because of his trucking experience at Cintas. Now, he designs and runs simulations that test Waymo’s vehicles for safety.

“One of the things I do is to create scenarios that are used when the situation is too dangerous to test and collect in real life,” Orella says. For example, how does an AV behave when faced with an unpredictable pedestrian? “These are things we need to test and improve in the synthetic world before moving them into the real world.”

The State of the Industry 

The fact that cars without drivers are in the real world at all is a sign of the industry’s progression. When looking at “Level 4” AVs — those that can operate without human intervention — robotaxis are the current focus. Waymo operates in 14 cities, with more on deck. Zoox is up and running in San Francisco and Las Vegas and testing in other cities. 

Unsurprisingly, the tech-forward Bay Area has been a proving ground. Naren Agrawal — professor of information systems and analytics at the Leavey School of Business and an experienced scholar in the fields of supply chain management, analytics and more — says he no longer turns his head when he sees a driverless car on the street. “The autonomous vehicle industry has entered a new phase,” Agrawal says. “For a long time, I think the focus was primarily on establishing technological feasibility. I think we are past that. I think it's really about whether we can scale this concept economically and operationally now.”

As a former student of Agrawal, Sanghavi takes a systems-oriented view to scaling the industry. In addition to developing systems for the cost of manufacturing — because Zoox builds its own vehicles — reaching an economically viable model requires efficiency at every step along the way. For just one example, each vehicle requires a multipoint safety check every day.

“How do we make sure that it is not going to take two hours every single day to put a single vehicle out on the road?” she asks. “How can we reduce that time from two hours to 20 minutes, or to two minutes?” 

Geographic expansion is another natural evolution. Agrawal says any AV company expanding to new cities must account for cultural differences, nuances of traffic laws and even the climate. An AV in Boston or Chicago will face different challenges — from varied traffic laws to snow and ice — than one driving in sunny Phoenix. 

In fact, Orella has created extensive documentation on driving regulations for a workforce of national and international “trainers” to use as they prepare AVs for the road. Still, he points to another milestone as the natural next step for the industry: “A lot of the future centers around fully unlocking the freeway. Can we ride as confidently there as we do currently on a city’s surface streets?” 

Freeways come with their own set of challenges for AVs, including the need to navigate construction zones and make decisions at a faster pace. This challenge was evident during a voluntary Waymo recall in June 2026 after vehicles entered construction zones at the wrong speed. The company tested its vehicles, issued software updates and started operating on freeways again about a month later. 

Freeways are critical for a reason. They offer more routes for people taxing robotaxis, for one thing. But freeway travel also opens up future possibilities beyond robotaxis, such as trucking and freight, which many see as the next natural fit for the industry. 

“Any frontier technology is going to face similar challenges,” Lundin says. “One is winning the trust of the public and the lawmakers and the regulators to actually enable you to do the work.” Even at the level of early testing, regulation varies greatly by state in terms of what is allowed — a factor in what cities are chosen for deployment.

Public perception is another challenge. Agarwal notes the tendency for people to have a “perception asymmetry” for AVs in comparison to human drivers. One failure or issue may garner disproportionate headlines and reaction versus the thousands of human traffic accidents that happen every day. But he also says that, as with any new technology, perceptions shift with time, exposure and a proven safety record.

Orella backs this up with a personal anecdote. “That first driverless car ride anyone takes, they’re on their phone taking pictures and looking at absolutely everything,” he says. “But I remember my mother-in-law — by her third ride, she was sleeping.”