Cognizant integrates AI to keep Aston Martin on track in Formula One
A technology executive traces decades of change, from Y2K to cloud computing and now artificial intelligence
For Aston Martin Aramco Formula One, hardware, cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI) models each hold real power on their own.
Turning that power into results on the track depends on connecting them into a single system that reacts fast enough to matter. That connective work can be the difference between a car that wins and one that does not, worth hundredths of a second in a championship battle.
Technology partners are increasingly judged on how well they connect the pieces, not just on what each one builds on its own.
“To Aston Martin, value means a car that performs and parts that can give them seconds and results on the track,” David Ingham, client partner and head of media, entertainment and sport at Cognizant, told TechJournal.uk in an interview.
“We’re kind of the glue that pulls their technology partners together,” Ingham said. “Cloud or AI models by themselves don’t do anything. They just sit there in silos.”
He said the other companies supporting the team are hardware, software, cloud or large language model (LLM) providers.
“We like the term AI builder. We’re integrators, architects and engineers who can take all these components and chain them together in a business process to achieve value,” he said.
He pointed to Cohere and CoreWeave as partners that supply proprietary AI models and expanded cloud computing capacity for the team. But Aston Martin still needs its own testing and virtual environments, along with Cognizant’s work architecting how data moves between the track and those systems.
Cognizant, a Nasdaq-listed technology services and AI company, has worked with Aston Martin for six seasons and holds the role exclusively within Formula One.
It formalized an expanded role with the team in April 2026, when it was named the team’s global AI services partner, a designation the two organizations describe as moving the relationship from experimentation toward sustained value, with Cognizant also helping manage and define the team’s fan database.
Ingham made similar comments in July at Aston Martin’s AMR Network Technology Forum, alongside CoreWeave, Cohere, NetApp and Zscaler.
The partnership also gives Cognizant a public proving ground, a way to show clients in banking, insurance, retail and other industries what its integrator approach can achieve under pressure, he said.
Chasing half a second
Formula One data used to travel at the pace of a race weekend. Now it moves in real time, matching the pace of the decisions it informs, with NetApp alone moving as much as 50 petabytes of data on race days, according to figures presented at the forum.
“Trackside data, whether from practice, qualifying or race day, comes back immediately,” Ingham said. “In the past, you could accumulate a weekend of race data and transfer it the following week. That’s no longer the case. It needs to come back immediately and go straight back into strategy.”
The team’s simulator sits inside Aston Martin’s factory. On qualifying and race days, real-time data sets are fed straight back to the driver in the simulator, who tests hypothetical laps based on the latest track and tire conditions before committing to a strategy change.
“Given the track conditions, the tire conditions and the performance of our competitors, can we get an extra half a second?” he said.
Cognizant’s own history stretches back to that same demand for speed and adaptation. The company was founded in 1994, when large-scale enterprise platforms were first being built across the industry, well before Formula One itself turned to artificial intelligence for an edge.
“There’s always been companies like Cognizant, and Cognizant has lived through multiple of these eras,” Ingham said.
The company navigated the Y2K transition, which placed heavy emphasis on systems testing, integration and architecture before working through the cloud era, the social media era, and the automation era, each of which required companies to modernize and transform once again.
“Fundamentally, AI is a different set of skills than existed in the past,” he said. “You can’t just buy AI and drop it into an organization and expect it to bring you value.”
Data and context must be fed into LLMs to produce useful outputs, he said. For Aston Martin, that means feeding the models the team’s engineering design history along with results from wind tunnel testing, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models, digital twins and trackside telemetry.
“Every time you go through these eras, clients need to look at the architecture, the tools, and the business processes and people skills that they have,” he said.
Making fans stickier
Cognizant’s other project with Aston Martin looks beyond the garage and toward the fans who follow the team online.
“In the media and entertainment industry, fan engagement and customer experience is huge,” Ingham said. “These companies now have a direct relationship with all of us, and they understand what we like to watch and consume.”
Media and entertainment companies spent the past decade moving from cinema and broadcast television, where they had no direct knowledge of their audience, toward direct relationships with consumers, he said. That shift is changing how his clients market products across film, television, digital platforms and live events such as Formula One.
“Everybody’s coming with a different angle. They want to see different content, messages, products and offers from the team,” he said.
Cognizant is working with Aston Martin to bring AI into the team’s apps, newsletters and website, tailoring content to fans drawn by the cars, the drivers or a home Grand Prix. Formula One’s fan base continues to grow across countries and age groups, underscoring the value of understanding each fan’s history and preferences.
“We work with any and all industries. We like to work with the global 2000, the largest enterprises in the world,” Ingham said. “What we like about Aston Martin is it’s a test bed for these technologies, and it allows us to show clients across any industry what AI can do.”
Cognizant’s clients span banking, insurance, retail, oil and gas, and media and entertainment.
He said the expertise required is staying current on these tools and, over time, upgrading Cognizant’s partnerships and its people so it can remain what he calls an AI builder for clients, naming OpenAI, Anthropic and Palantir as current AI and cloud partners.
“I think we’re too early in this AI era to say that we need fewer people,” he said. “Adding value does not always mean reducing costs or reducing the people that they have. It could be better products, products that people actually want to work with, that are personalized to them.”
He said trillions of dollars have reportedly been invested or planned for AI, but value has lagged.
“There’s a gap between the investment and the outcomes, and it’s up to companies like Cognizant to bridge that gap,” he said, citing Microsoft Copilot and Anthropic’s Claude as tools clients have already bought and now want a return on. “We have to look at how to help our clients get value out of them.”
For the second half of the year, Cognizant’s fan engagement project remains the priority, with a goal of measurable progress by September so fans grow stickier and engage more with Aston Martin’s content.