THE BUSINESS CHIEF INTERVIEW
Opening the door Motorsport has long been the preserve of wealthy families who can afford the hundreds of thousands of pounds required to progress through karting and junior series. The cost of taking a driver from their first kart race to a Formula One seat has been estimated at US $ 33m. Women are particularly underrepresented. Of all the licence holders authorised to drive racing cars in the United Kingdom, 97 % are men and just 3 % are women. Formula E is using artificial intelligence, in partnership with Google Cloud, to address this imbalance through AI-powered simulator coaching.“ Instead of having years and years of being able to drive a car because they can afford to drive a car, they’ ll go into simulators,” Jeff explains.“ We’ re using AI coaches to help them accelerate their learning, to give them a better shot of getting a seat in a car at the elite level.” It is, he argues, a concrete demonstration of the positive applications of emerging technology.“ You can choose how you view AI – in that sense, it’ s a huge accelerator of good,” Jeff says.
Sharing the playbook Competitors in commercial sport are not typically given to publishing their operational playbooks. Formula E does so deliberately, through an event series called Change Accelerated Live, which invites outside organisations to hear how the championship is making changes and what impact those changes are having.“ If we could help other people to be better
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