The core purpose of the partnership is around developing marginal gains and performance benefits on track for Mercedes through G42’s AI and big data analytics capabilities, whilst also beginning the journey of demystifying artificial intelligence.

In a sit-down interview held in Abu Dhabi, Toto Wolff expressed his excitement and optimism around the partnership and how this can benefit Mercedes going forwards, “You can see in a world of machines, the human connection is important. As you say, we are an engineering and data driven business. The quicker we learn, the better we are.

We are in a relative game and an honest sport where the stopwatch never lies. You’re either better than your competitors or not. So, I believe in marginal gains. But marginal gains are nothing compared to the magnitude of performance advantage that we can have with Peng and his team”

Building on Toto’s comments, Peng Xiao went on to say, “For me, as a practitioner in the AI domain, this is a watershed moment. I believe the highest pursuit in my field is to better understand human behaviour. To better ultimately understand our own human behaviour and our mentality, you have to go into domains where things are better controlled and there are boundaries, and in this example, sports.

In particular a high stress environment where you are driving a car. If you can look and go deep to understand the behaviour and driver behaviour, I believe it is so exciting and we can translate this into broader domains of human behaviour, which for me is the highest purpose that AI can serve.”

As the two organizations become embedded within one another’s processes, the hope is that a greater understanding will be developed around each organization’s capabilities and ultimately start to fully understand the boundless potential this partnership holds.

You can watch the full conversation here.