Brunswick Corporation has appointed Marco Bracalente as Chief Technology Officer with effect from 1 January 2027, part of a set of senior leadership changes the marine group announced on 29 September 2026.
Bracalente is currently Vice President of Product Development and Engineering at Navico Group, Brunswick's marine electronics and integrated systems business, and he will continue in that role alongside the group technology remit. The combination keeps him close to the business where most of Brunswick's electronics and software development actually happens while giving him authority across the wider group.
He takes the chief technology officer title from Aine Denari, who holds it today and who becomes Chief Executive Officer of Brunswick Corporation on the same date. Will Sangster becomes Executive Vice President and President of Navico Group, also from 1 January 2027, filling the role Denari vacates as she moves up.
The appointments complete a leadership slate that Brunswick has been assembling in public since September. The group announced on 21 September 2026 that Denari would take the chief executive role and that David Everitt, the board's lead independent director, would become Non-Executive Chairman, both from the start of 2027.
Brunswick's technology agenda is more consequential than the title might suggest at a company best known for boat and engine brands. The marine industry has been moving from mechanical systems toward electrified propulsion, digital helm interfaces, connected vessel services and autonomy-adjacent docking and handling features. Navico Group is where much of that capability sits, covering marine electronics, sensors, displays, power systems and the software that ties them together.
Putting the chief technology officer role with the executive who runs product development at that unit is a structural choice rather than a cosmetic one. It means group technology strategy is set by someone with direct accountability for shipping product, which tends to shorten the distance between a roadmap and a boat that leaves the factory with the feature on it.
The dual-hatting also carries a risk that boards usually weigh carefully. A group technology officer is supposed to arbitrate between business units, and doing that from inside one of them requires discipline. Brunswick has evidently judged that the benefit of technical proximity outweighs the governance cost, at least during a transition year in which the chief executive, the chairman and two business unit leaders are all changing at once.
For suppliers and dealers the practical question is whether the pace of electronics integration across Brunswick's boat and engine brands changes. The group has spent several years pushing to make its own propulsion, controls and electronics work together as a single system rather than as components assembled by a boatbuilder. Bracalente owns that programme from January, and the 2027 model year will be the first one shaped under the new arrangement.
