Chairman & Chief Executive Officer, Honeywell International Inc
Honeywell Technologies CEO on Activist Pressure, Splitting the Company, and AI
On this week’s Leaders with Francine Lacqua, she speaks with Honeywell Technologies Chief Executive and Chair Vimal Kapur about his journey from entry-level engineer in India to leading one of the world’s biggest industrial companies. He explains why he chose to split Honeywell into three businesses, how he navigated pressure from activist investor Elliott Investment Management and why he believes artificial intelligence will reshape work by augmenting people — not replacing them.
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About Vimal Kapur
Vimal Kapur, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Honeywell Technologies, has been discussing the company's recent restructuring into three separate businesses and its strategic focus on automation and artificial intelligence. In a June 2026 interview, Kapur said the decision to break up the company was already underway before activist investor Elliott Investment Management publicly disclosed a stake in Honeywell in late 2024, describing the relationship as collaborative and aligned on strategy. He noted that simplifying the company's structure was necessary for achieving top-line growth. Kapur also addressed his personal background, having started his career as an entry-level engineer in India before rising to lead the company. Kapur has emphasized the company's focus on industrial AI and moving from automation to autonomy. At a June 2026 investor day, he outlined a long-term growth target of 4-7% organic sales growth and expressed confidence in delivering 10% adjusted income growth. He stated that Honeywell is making a strategic choice to operate in mission-critical segments where uptime matters, and that the company aims to increase its services and software revenue to 45% of total revenue. Kapur described AI as a tool to augment human workers rather than replace them, and said that the industry is likely to shift toward agentic AI systems over the next 5–10 years.
Transcript (70 segments)
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Vimal Kapur0:00
We as a company have been always fast adopter of technology and we use adopt AI naturally. Where we have seen most impact is more productivity. Transformational will occur if we redraw our work right, in which we can use agents as part of our workflow, and that requires us to reimagine the work by itself.
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Francine Lacqua0:17
I'm Francine Lacqua and this is leaders, the podcast that explores what drives the world's most influential people. Be sure to follow and subscribe now so you never miss an episode. This week I'm speaking to Vimal Kapur, the chair and chief executive of the newly formed automation company Honeywell Technologies. Until recently, Kapur was a group chair and CEO of Honeywell International, the tech and manufacturing conglomerate that made everything from thermostats to aircraft engines. Now, Kapur's road to the C-suite is particularly interesting to me. He started and spent much of his career in India, his birthplace, joining in his 20s. He then rose to running its automation business in India, a satellite site of Honeywell. But it wasn't until later that he moved to corporate Honeywell in the U.S. And eventually secured the top job. However, shortly after assuming the role of group CEO, Kapur made the bold decision to break up the company, a move that actually coincided with the arrival of an activist investor on the scene. And with 2026 marking the culmination of Honeywell split. I wanted to catch up with Kapur as he prepared for his new role Vimal Kapur,
Thank you so much for joining us on leaders.
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Vimal Kapur1:35
Appreciate you having me here today.
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Francine Lacqua1:37
So talk to me about how you started out.
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Vimal Kapur1:37
So I started in joint venture of Honeywell in India. So in Honeywell, before that I had three jobs in three years, right? So I made fast decisions. Yeah, of what I didn't want to do. So my first job was a government owned company. Didn't like the speed, it was not my place. So I found a job in one of the smaller companies, which was much more traditional way of working, very centralized. And didn't like that either. And then Honeywell started a joint venture with the Tata Group in 1988, and I joined in 89, and it was actually a startup. And one benefit there was that you don't have a defined job. Job depends upon what's going on. And you have to take different roles, which makes you learn more by default, less compartmentalization. So that early learning through that cycle was very, very helpful to be in commercial function, to be in project management, and that gives you a much more accelerated pace of learning. So there's a school of thought that says, look, if you don't work in a headquarters, it's actually very, very difficult to rise to the top.
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Francine Lacqua2:35
That wasn't your case.
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Vimal Kapur2:43
One thing I always believe is there is no one definitive path for you to get to the top of any role in a company. So I did practically all my life in roles which were customer facing or business and never worked in corporate ever. So it's kind of good to be called corporate now. Being CEO of the company is different, but I certainly benefit from my years of experience in different segments of the company.
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Francine Lacqua3:07
I mean, that's really different from other CEOs.
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Vimal Kapur3:09
Yeah, it maybe it is. I guess the benefit of having worked in different parts of the company certainly gives you more clarity on the customer needs and how employees think and how the business really works. I think it's easier to learn the corporate side of it. The new things I had to learn as a CEO was more around building relationship with investors; that's relatively new, but the business side is very, very similar.
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Francine Lacqua3:37
So what did you learn about leading a team outside headquarters as opposed to within headquarters?
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Vimal Kapur3:42
I think leading a team outside headquarters, you want people to have more decision powers. They want to move with speed, and they want to be clear on what they can do and what they cannot do. Once they know that, they feel more empowered. So that, to me, is the fundamental difference: you come with a mindset of how to make things easier, because big companies can make things more complicated.
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Francine Lacqua4:04
So concretely, how do you do it? Do you remind people on the ground, or do you remind headquarters to listen to people on the ground?
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Vimal Kapur4:11
Simply saying reduce bureaucracy can end up creating work which is more than the previous work, which will not lead to any outcome. But if you want to get more work to the front end, you have to make structural changes on how you're organized. Maybe the decision rights have to move from center to the front end, and that requires time. But that's some of the things we have been doing.
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Francine Lacqua4:36
Is it difficult to get noticed when you were sitting in India? Was it difficult to speak up if everything felt so far away?
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Vimal Kapur4:43
In a company like Honeywell, there's a benefit of having a global structure in which you get to participate in different decision making. But obviously, as I moved into different roles, your visibility changes because your decision rights are changing. I never felt I was not heard. Part of it is also in your own mindset — how much you think you can bring up something. And that's why the quality of courage is very important. You say what's working well and not working well with facts; you don't offer opinion, you don't pass generic statements. If you come with a mindset to say, I observe this, I think this is a better way to do it, that's going to be appreciated more than just being generally critical of everything.
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Francine Lacqua5:44
Do you think you want to be respectful or sugarcoat things?
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Vimal Kapur5:44
I think you want to be respectful. Facts should be stated in a manner which are facts. You don't want to criticize anything. That doesn't mean you have to sugarcoat it, but you don't be critical. You state fact to say this is less effective because here's the facts and here's an alternative way to do it.
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Francine Lacqua6:04
So what was the moment where you thought you were being considered for a CEO or bigger job?
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Vimal Kapur6:09
For Honeywell, I would say there's no one moment. First thing I did was never said no to any role, because I always believed that all jobs are good. When you say no to a role, usually they have to say yes. But if you are too choosy and too debating, you are starting with a negative mindset. I always say that if a role exists in a company, it is important because large companies will eliminate a role if it's not important for them. So each role when you perform and you outperform, that makes a case that you're ready for your next move. There was no one job which made such a big transformational gain. It's like this job, you performed well, next job you performed well. And it was two or three times when I outperformed that made the case that you're a strong candidate.
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Francine Lacqua7:05
So when do you get the call to go to head office? What was that like?
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Vimal Kapur7:06
I was a segment leader in 2022 when my previous CEO of Honeywell, he mentioned that he would like to considering his retirement. He mentioned that that's the plan and I'll have to go to the formal interview process with the board. I'm the candidate, but I'm not selected. The process is quite interesting because you have to put forward a vision of the company to the board, and you have nobody supporting you at all. You're all by yourself because nobody knows the process is going on. You have to build your own materials, you have to research all by yourself, and you have to do that while you're doing your job because it's supposed to be all confidential, which was fun.
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Francine Lacqua7:49
Fun or terrifying?
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Vimal Kapur7:49
It was fun. I treat learning as fun. When hard work becomes stressful, it just becomes terrifying. So I went through that process and the board selected me as a candidate, and then in June 2023 I assumed the role. It was announced a couple of months earlier.
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Francine Lacqua8:08
Okay, so you get this like secret call and you have to come up with a secret plan to convince the board that you're the right person for the job. Do you tell your family?
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Vimal Kapur8:17
Yeah, of course. I told my wife and my daughter, the only two people I had to share the excitement with.
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Francine Lacqua8:24
And what were their reactions?
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Vimal Kapur8:28
They were a bit shocked because nobody expected me to get this far. They always felt that I take my job very seriously, but I don't take myself very seriously. That's kind of been my mantra. I started as an entry level engineer at Honeywell, so they saw me grow over so many roles. I think they did not expect I'd reach that far. So it was a kind of surprise.
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Francine Lacqua8:51
In 2024, not long after Vimal Kapur assumed the role of group CEO, a well-known activist investor, Elliott Investment Management, amassed a $5 billion stake in Honeywell and called for the conglomerate to split. Now, Kapur was already in the process of slimming down the portfolio, having announced one month earlier the spin-off of Honeywell's advanced materials business as a standalone company. But Elliott's move also shone a spotlight on the company's performance and strategic direction. So in February 2025, shortly after Elliott's intervention, Kapur confirmed that the remainder of Honeywell would break up. I wanted to know how Kapur handled the pressure, how it impacted his decision making, and how he thinks other CEOs facing activist investors can focus on driving results while canceling out the noise. You announced that Honeywell will be split up. What was wrong with Honeywell before?
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Vimal Kapur9:48
Honeywell did extremely well in the last 20 years, from 2005 to 2022, 2023 timeframe. It created massive shareholder value. We are a company which did a great job of running businesses efficiently, globalizing ourselves. So it was clear to me that our next 50 years, the earnings growth will come from top line growth, and top line growth is hard to accomplish if you are a complex structure addressing multiple segments. That was my incoming pieces when I started. But two things happened simultaneously when I started as a CEO. First, the aerospace industry started growing, and at the same time ChatGPT came in and AI started becoming an important conversation. I always felt that we need to simplify. Aerospace has a huge growth potential in front of it. Automation business has a huge growth potential with AI. And when we did the work, we found that each company can stand on its own feet with these growth vectors, which led many to this decision.
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Francine Lacqua10:50
But it must be hard to take the stuff you've always worked at and decide to split it up into three completely different entities.
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Vimal Kapur11:00
Yeah, it's hard. But if you do it thoughtfully, you are preparing each company for its success for the next 50 to 100 years. That's a belief we really have: that each segment we have created is capable of its own future with a very compelling proposition.
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Francine Lacqua11:18
You also had an activist investor on your tail, Elliott. Did that focus the mind? Was that a catalyst for splitting?
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Vimal Kapur11:20
Elliott came into Honeywell's stock in late 2024, and we were far along the way towards this journey. I would say that given what they wanted versus where we were going strategically, we were quite aligned. There was no disagreement. It was not about what, it was about how to go from A to B — go by train or go by plane. That's opinion, but you can always align on that. So it's been a very collaborative approach.
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Francine Lacqua11:51
When did you find out you had an activist investor? Speaking to CEOs, a lot of them say this is a nightmare because you're trying to do your strategy and suddenly you have someone that just wants in.
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Vimal Kapur11:59
I learned the same day like everybody else learned because it was a public letter. I did not get a call before. They were very clear on their expectation with their research, which was made public. Given that we already had done work in the same lines, there was a convergence. We had not publicly announced our intention, but we were far along on that decision.
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Francine Lacqua12:28
So I know a lot of CEOs will be watching this. Did you call Elliott when you found out? Do you feel like you aligned with them right away?
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Vimal Kapur12:34
Straight away. It was an exchange of ideas. Their letter was public on what they wanted, so we understood their plan and shared our point of view on what we want to do and why. There was a consensus that it's the right thing to do.
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Francine Lacqua12:54
So what's your best piece of advice to a chief executive that will be getting a call maybe today from an activist?
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Vimal Kapur12:58
If you have a conviction on your strategy, that's what you need to think about and worry about. If that's clear, then it's less about what they believe in and more about what you believe in. If you believe in something and are able to articulate it with passion, the probability is that you will be listened. But if you are all over the place, then the opposition can win because you lack clarity. So be prepared at all times with your strategy. Be clear on the longer term view of your business, and specifically when the business is not performing well or stock is not performing well, be clear on what are the underlying drivers and what are you going to do about that. If you are clear, whether it's your current shareholders or an activist, they are asking the same question. The board will ask that question. So I don't think the question really changes; just the narrative of an activist gets more visibility.
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Francine Lacqua14:03
Did they shorten the timeline of the transformation of the company?
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Vimal Kapur14:05
No, not really. We said that we're going to complete the aerospace spin by end of 2026, but we were able to procedurally do it faster. I don't think anybody can sit in end of 2024 and forecast exactly how much time it will take. But once you make an announcement, it's in everybody's interest to do it faster.
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Francine Lacqua14:28
Honeywell's break up into three separate companies was finalized in June 2026. There's a specialty materials company, the aerospace and aviation company, and Honeywell Technologies, the automation company that Kapur is running now. With the changing brief, I was keen to ask him what it's like to be a chief executive operating in the current political climate and where he sees the greatest opportunity for AI. Do you think the US economy is going through a transformational change because of automation, aero defense, the demands from the Trump administration? How different will that look?
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Vimal Kapur15:07
Aerospace is benefiting from growth in demand of consumer travel, business jet travel, and defense growth. For automation business, we have been controlling building infrastructure, airports, refineries, warehouses for many years. But the data we collected was only used for control. That's the question we are asking ourselves: how the data becomes more useful for the operational excellence of an asset. So that's an opportunity for us.
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Francine Lacqua15:33
Given we're talking about leadership, how difficult is it to be a US-based chief executive with unpredictable policies coming from the White House?
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Vimal Kapur15:41
Businesses like predictability, and clearly predictability is less or things are changing faster and you have to adapt. That's a reality. Whether it is tariff-based issues that have occurred, that's become a new normal. We fully understand what the administration expectation is. The job of CEOs has become much more dynamic since COVID. So to me, it's in the series of that constant high amount of change, and we are getting more used to dealing with change all the time.
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Francine Lacqua16:13
But is it about having thicker skin? Sometimes you see President Trump attacking companies. How do you manage reputational damage?
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Vimal Kapur16:19
It's about doing the right thing as a company. We believe you should do what's right for our shareholders, right for our customers. As long as you focus on the foundational things, I do not wake up in the morning to worry about external factors beyond my control, even if that means policy change or being directly attacked. Policy change, absolutely we respond. Who do I rely on for advice? My entire staff, my entire team, and the board in certain matters. I by default believe in collective decision making. I do not absolve the fact that I have to make a decision in the end. I have to take a call, but you want to have everybody's opinion and input to make a more superior decision.
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Francine Lacqua17:09
What about external advice? The biggest and hardest decision you've had to make was to split Honeywell. Did you get external bankers or consultancy firms to validate your thinking?
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Vimal Kapur17:20
You are not going to rely on a third party for such a big decision. But if you want to cement that decision to say, let's check the tertiary factors and make sure we are not making any error, that's where you use external help. And we do like to work with external bankers and consultants.
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Francine Lacqua17:40
Are there any books or management frameworks that have helped you along the way?
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Vimal Kapur17:43
I never studied MBA, so I was always conscious of that. I always used to read a lot of books on something I was experiencing. Early days I was a big fan of Lean Six Sigma. Many years ago, I read books on the Toyota production system, how exactly it works. So you always use a good quality framework. Nowadays, you watch a lot of YouTube; it's a new way to learn.
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Francine Lacqua18:13
How do you learn about AI and what it means versus large language models versus agents versus generative? But how important is AI to the work you do at Honeywell?
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Vimal Kapur18:23
We as a company have been always fast adopters of technology. So part of it is how it drives productivity in our own operations. The advantage we have is that we are digitally native; for many years we invested in a lot of foundational systems. We can adopt faster; we don't have to do the foundational work. But the bigger opportunity is how we use it for our customers.
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Francine Lacqua18:46
But is this productivity, or does it actually enable you to do something that you can't do now? Is it transformational?
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Vimal Kapur18:49
Mostly I would say where we have seen most impact is more productivity, specifically in software development and software testing. Transformational will occur if we redraw our work right, in which we can use agents as part of our workflow. That requires us to reimagine the work by itself: look at the steps which an agent can perform and then the rest of the steps a human has to perform. I truly believe this is another way to drive productivity. What excites me is the opportunity it has for our customers because we create a lot of data. Our customers have one common issue in the sectors we serve: they are short of skilled people. Skilled people are required to operate, maintain, run. They are increasingly becoming fewer as retirements come. They are already forecasting fewer and fewer people available for specific roles. The only solution is to automate a portion of work or make the work performable by lower skilled people. So it means creating more tools so that people are more productive. A five-year experience person can do a 15-year experience person's role. That's where the AI, physical AI work comes in, where we use the data we have in our systems and train the data to perform tasks to make our customers' people more skilled, make their assets run smarter, operations done better.
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Francine Lacqua20:21
Workers must be anxious about it.
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Vimal Kapur20:23
Yes and no. If you are in segments where there is a shortage of people by default, the role of AI will be more agent systems coming in over a period of time. That's true to every company. But if I look at our customers' world, they don't have enough people to run their operations, maintain their operations efficiently. So there's less anxiety about anybody taking away a job; the more anxiety is what will happen three to five years from now. Plus, foundationally, the population is not growing in the entire world. The implication of that is 10 to 15 years from now, less workforce is coming into work. So how will work happen when you need touch labor? Displacement will occur where work can be automated.
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Francine Lacqua21:10
Does it change the qualities in leaders that we need? That you're no longer a cheerleader or someone who inspires or has a vision, but you're more of a programmer?
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Vimal Kapur21:17
If you look at the evolution of technology over the last 30 or 40 years, more and more work is getting automated and humans are elevated to a higher level of decision making. It comes in bursts. Every time a big burst comes up — when I started working, for the first year or 18 months, I didn't even have a computer. I was given a computer in 89. So I'm from the era of the source PC first, then the internet, then a mobile phone. Every time these occurrences occur, there's a lot of noise that it's going to take away jobs. But this is the way technology inflects itself, and it becomes a new normal. There's always some churn. As humans, we have to always raise our skills. If we are static, then our jobs are always at risk.
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Francine Lacqua22:11
Rapid fire. In an era of workers needing to skill up, what's a new skill you've learned recently?
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Vimal Kapur22:17
Learning more about AI and the difference between different forms of AI. I didn't even know the difference. Just last Sunday I saw a one-hour video on generative AI vs. agentic AI, what's the difference.
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Francine Lacqua22:26
Career coach: great investment or pass?
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Vimal Kapur22:31
It depends on who you are. If you need help to build certain skills, a career coach is a great tool. You must know what help you need. But if you are looking generically to find a magic answer, it's a pass.
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Francine Lacqua22:47
Have you had a career coach?
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Vimal Kapur22:47
I had good HR partners for many years, I would say, and I treated them as a career coach to help me become a better leader. I gave them always the keys to the kingdom to say, you can criticize me, but you have to let me know what I can do better.
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Francine Lacqua23:01
Top tip for pushing back against being micromanaged.
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Vimal Kapur23:06
Show the facts how it is causing harm. If you simply say a high-level statement that it's not working, people are going to shrug shoulders or roll their eyes. But if you are more specific to say, here's an example, how micromanaging is causing damage, slowing me down, we are losing business or losing speed, then there's a higher probability that the leadership team will listen.
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Francine Lacqua23:30
Vimal, thank you so much for your time today.
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Vimal Kapur23:31
Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.