The purpose-driven enterprise of the future

At the last AI Summit in New York I spoke with Sylvain Filippi, managing director and CTO of the Envision Racing team, about the purpose-driven enterprise of the future.

I'm often asked by the boards we work with how to use artificial intelligence (AI) to build more purpose-driven enterprises and teams. How can AI be used not only to solve today's business problems but also achieve bigger goals that benefit wider society?

The ability to use AI to adapt, respond, and learn from data to solve a problem within a project, then translate this into corporate success, can transform industries, lead to a better world, and ultimately impact the human condition. It may sound lofty, but this is an important benefit that AI can deliver.

For Envision Racing, it's not just about winning races. There's a bigger purpose: to accelerate the transition to renewable and sustainable mobility. As the problems of congestion, pollution, and climate change continue to grow, Formula E is working hard to solve these issues in two ways.

The first is to build knowledge of the cutting-edge technologies behind the lightweight, super-efficient, and high-performance electric race cars. Its partners and suppliers can learn from their work and then apply it to the electric road cars that consumers will be buying within the next couple of years. We're proud that our work embedding AI and advanced analytics helps the team build these insights to better understand and boost performance.

Secondly, they are using motorsport as a marketing and communication platform to promote sustainable electric transport. Over the eight-month racing season, worldwide audiences watch electric cars navigating the twists and turns of street racing at up to 170 mph for 45 minutes. The realization is spreading that if electric cars can perform at this level, then they're good enough for the school run and grocery shopping, and adoption will increase.

And as AI and analytics continue to overcome day-to-day challenges and enhance performance, they also free the team from some activities that aren't directly tied to the team's purpose in the championship: to win races. With greater insight, agility, and capacity, each team member can make better decisions that help drivers stay ahead of the pack.

Outside of motorsport, purpose-driven teams in pharmaceutical companies are having a big impact on patient health. AI is helping global pharmacovigilance teams monitor a diverse range of information sources for adverse events from their medicines, and then compile and report them to regulators. Changing global regulatory requirements, the explosion in social media, and the growing number of drugs on the market are adding to the size and complexity of the reporting task.

With AI acting as the neural wiring, natural language processing, extraction, and classification capabilities can be used to build machine-learning models for advanced pharmaceutical companies. They can monitor patterns to track drug-safety issues in real time and respond to problems quicker. This data also allows them to be more forward looking, predicting future safety issues from new drugs. All of which addresses the larger goal of patient safety. A great example of how effective use of technology is contributing to a much higher purpose.

These stories from Formula E and the global pharma industry show the transformative power of AI to enable more purpose-driven organizations.

Register for Formula E Fanboost to give the Envision Racing team additional power during the next race. And get under the hood of how we're building the world's first instinctive racing team with my first post on the role of data and second on connected ecosystems.