Aston Martin F1 chief admits AI usage and what that means for their engineers' future

An Aston Martin F1 chief has explained the use of AI within the team, and the impact it may have on team members at the Silverstone-based outfit.

Aston Martin are a highly ambitious team that are seeking to become world champions in the next few seasons, with new regulations in 2026 potentially offering them that chance to make a jump on their rivals.

They have employed design legend Adrian Newey - a man who has won 25 championships across his career - to their cause, alongside former Ferrari chief Enrico Cardile.

On top of that, the team have a two-time world champion driver in Fernando Alonso and a new state-of-the-art facility at Silverstone that they hope will push them on to the next level.

Now Sioned Edwards, IT Operations Director at Aston Martin, has described the use of AI within the team, and how it is shaping their race strategies across grand prix weekends.

"AI, like other tools, is implemented to help engineers, not replace them," she told Gazzetta dello Sport. "We use artificial intelligence on the weekend, not to choose a strategy, but to perhaps help strategists make one choice or another. It can be used, for example, to perform an analysis on a data set and save the engineer time.

"Our goal is to find the right opportunities at the right time, and to do that, we need to analyse and interpret a huge amount of data. AI and other tools are there to help engineers do this. But the goal is not to replace the engineers themselves, and the final decision remains theirs."

Aston Martin leading the way on AI

While multiple teams have hinted at the ways in which AI is helping them with a number of elements of their strategy and car design practices, Aston Martin seem to be the team most keen to explore its uses.

The team built Ai.lonso last year, a tool that looks and sounds very much like their star driver Alonso, but was built in partnership with two leading AI technology companies, ElevenLabs and DeepReel.

Ai.lonso's job is to make the team's website content more accessible and user friendly, allowing fans to have Alonso's voice reading articles to them in any language, while also explaining things such as images and videos within copy.

While AI has its uses and the market had been predicted to be worth over $1 trillion by 2030, there has been some concern in recent weeks about the bubble bursting, and certain AI companies being valued way higher than they are actually worth.

Warnings have come from the Bank of England, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), as well as JP Morgan boss Jamie Dimon who told the BBC that "the level of uncertainty should be higher in most people's minds."

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