As part of its strategic partnership with Envision Virgin Racing, Genpact a global professional services firm focused on delivering digital transformation, today unveiled the latest innovation in bringing critical competitive intelligence to the Formula E team. Using advanced digital analytics and artificial intelligence, Genpact’s Radio Analytics Engine (RAE) analyzes and organizes hours of radio communication generated simultaneously by drivers during a race and turns that into structured signals to derive real-time insights that can be used to inform lightning-fast decisions on the track, where seconds could mean the difference between victory and defeat.
In the FIA Formula E World Championship, where 12 teams and 24 drivers race cutting-edge single-seater electric vehicles to razor-thin victories, the radio chatter between the Formula E drivers and their engineers carries significant competitive intelligence. This chatter has the potential to yield millions of insights, but the sheer volume of information shared across teams makes the process of deriving intelligence from audio an incredibly difficult challenge to solve.
This challenge was just made easier by Genpact. Working with the Envision Virgin Racing engineers and data scientists to create RAE, an intelligence engine that turns volumes of unstructured data into accessible insights, Genpact enhances the team’s pre-race planning, in- race decisions, and future strategies, using advanced analytics to extract valuable insights from these live radio exchanges.
During each race, drivers and engineers share a range of topics over the radio, from bits of information about energy status and strategy instructions to words of encouragement and frustration. Some conversations are cloaked in codewords, while others are plainly spoken. All this chatter represents a massive amount of unstructured data that sounds like noise to the untrained ear (or machine). Where standard algorithms may struggle, RAE takes this noise and gives it structure through digital analytics and artificial intelligence, helping to reveal important insights that can make the difference between winning and losing.
“The insights from radio analytics make a massive difference. We wouldn’t be able to pull such valuable insights from such high volumes of unstructured data at speed and scale without Genpact’s digital technology and data skills,” said Gil Abrantes, strategy engineer, Envision Virgin Racing. “Monitoring competitors allows us to adjust our strategy in real time. If we know when another driver is considering taking attack mode, we can act in advance.”
This intelligence has already driven results, even in the early days of testing in select season 7 races. For example, during the Mexico E-Prix, Envision Virgin Racing driver Nick Cassidy started eighth on the grid. RAE’s insights helped him decide when to use attack mode to overtake his competitors, earning Cassidy a third-place finish, his first first-ever Formula E podium.
“From the boardroom to the racetrack, what’s key to success is having the right insights at the right time. But far too often, information is lost in data, as signals hide in a sea of noise,” said Sanjay Srivastava, chief digital officer, Genpact. “For Envision Virgin Racing, these radio exchanges are a treasure trove of insights, but only if you have the ability to quickly harmonize, analyze, and interpret the vast volumes of data across different sources. We are advancing the frontiers in data engineering, advanced analytics and artificial intelligence to make this happen.”
The same intelligence that wins races helps businesses create the competitive advantage they need. For example, Genpact leverages similar technology to help financial institutions use speech analytics to improve interactions with customers. Similarly, Genpact helps insurers extract claims information in real time – turning vast amounts of data, in this case photos of auto accidents, home damage, or other insurance-related claims – to drive a faster, more accurate understanding of the potential liability and size of an insurance payout.
Envision Virgin Racing has competed in every race since Formula E’s inception and is continuously searching for fresh sources of advantage. The team is looking forward to using RAE alongside Genpact’s Augmented Race Intelligence solution during the eighth season of Formula E World Championship set to start in January 2022.
