James Vowles

That's not what I would consider AI.

But that's about the level that some Formula One teams are today.

Why?

We're incredibly domain-specific.

What we do is only done by 10 other teams in the world.

There's no one else that works on an engineering lifecycle of five weeks, I want these ideas, and I want them at the track.

That doesn't mean we can't make it better with AI, but it does mean you can't replace that with skilled human beings.

Some repeatable tasks are more set up for agentic flows to make a difference.

Some of it's legal HR finance, being completely blunt, which is where you see speed up, because they are repeatable tasks that you can actually wrap system and process around.

We're asking human beings to read a set of rules and come up with innovative ways of designing and producing those products very quickly.

And it's less set up for that reason, if you see what I mean.

It's not repeatable.

Every day they're doing a different job or a different way of working.

That doesn't mean there's things we can't do to make it better, which is what I've described.

But I also think that means that we've been a little bit behind the curve on it because it is such a specialist domain.

The next part is this.

We're flat out the whole time.

And when you're flat out the whole time, all too often you don't take a moment to think about what you're doing and think whether there's a better way of doing it.

And I think a part of it is just that.

We are so driven to bring 20 milliseconds to the next race that we may not be thinking about how to bring performance in two years' time through different structures and ways of working.