Interview: Dan Cherowbrier, CTO, Formula E

Embracing innovation

At Formula E, Cherowbrier, who reports to CEO Jeff Dodds, manages a team of around 20 professionals. This in-house team is bolstered by talent from the sport’s key technology partners, including Infosys.

Cherowbrier became full-time CTO in January 2025, but he’d worked as a technology consultant for the organisation before joining permanently. For most of his IT leadership career, he has operated as a fractional CTO, working at organisations for two to three days a week, providing strategic technology guidance.

“Formula E decided 18 months ago that they wanted a full-time CTO,” he says, referring to the shift to a permanent position with the organisation. They made that decision because they saw where AI was going. They decided they wanted to be a tech-first championship, so they invested in leadership, and then I’ve dropped most of my other roles to focus on being CTO.”

So, how has Cherowbrier found the shift to full-time CTO? The answer, after more than a decade of being self-employed, is enjoyable.

“Being part of a team in a way that you didn’t have before is rewarding,” he says. “We’re only 12 years old, and a lot of the company has been there since day one and has taken that journey together.”

Now, with Cherowbrier, the technology team is forging new directions in digital transformation. Rather than in the early days of the sport, when innovation was mainly focused on making electric cars go as fast as possible, the concentration now is on developing a broad culture of innovation across the organisation and beyond.

“We’re trying to expand that approach out to the rest of what we do, not just inside the sport, but inside in terms of how we message our fans, how we do our freight, how we run our business, how we do our finances and making it so that everyone can come up with the new ideas,” says Cherowbrier. “It might be the wrong idea at the wrong time, but there’s no such thing as a bad idea.

“We want everyone to be confident and comfortable coming up with ideas. If someone on the logistics or finance team has an idea about something we should pursue in broadcast, we want to hear it. It doesn’t matter whether an idea comes from inside or outside the company. The more ideas you’ve got, the better place you’re in to choose.”

Exploiting data

Since becoming CTO in January 2025, Cherowbrier has overseen some significant shifts. He gives the example of a change in Formula E’s freight footprint.

Previously, the organisation ran the championship using three jumbo jets that took freight to tracks around the world. Air freight moves the cars, the batteries and valuable technology equipment, such as the TV cameras. At the start of 2025, Cherowbrier and his team used data to reduce air freight from three planes to two.

“We used AI to analyse all the things we take on the planes,” he says, adding that the company used Google Gemini to power this process. We asked questions like, ‘Why do we take it? Can we source it locally?’. For instance, we now source our medical cars locally. That approach took two cars out of our freight, which is huge, and allowed us to get down to two planes, which has a huge impact on our cost base and carbon emissions.”

“The amazing thing about motorsport is we’re dripping in data...Success is about how you then use that data to tell a story”

Dan Cherowbrier, Formula E

Cherowbrier continues to look for ways to exploit digital and data. Google Cloud is Formula E’s principal AI partner as the organisation aims to optimise racing performance, streamline operations and enhance global fan experiences. Infosys, meanwhile, is Formula E’s digital innovation partner, with the two organisations seeking ways to exploit analytics effectively.

“The amazing thing about motorsport is we’re dripping in data,” he says. “If you think about the data you might have in a tennis match, you’ve got two players and a ball, and then maybe a little bit about the surface and the weather. We have an entire racetrack, with 20 cars and 20 drivers from 10 teams, all producing different data. Success is about how you then use that data to tell a story.”

Doubling down on AI is the priority for the next 12 months.

“Every CTO in the country is worried about how to adopt AI as fast as they need to,” says Cherowbrier. “Every CEO and CFO is worried about that area, too. It’s almost like an arms race, but you’re desperate not to get it wrong as well, right? So, there’s a fear of missing out and a fear of getting it wrong.”

Improving experiences

Cherowbrier says Formula E’s AI efforts are divided into three bands. First, bottom-up work, where staff across the organisation are permitted to experiment with emerging technology, so long as the capability sits in the organisation’s existing technology stack. The middle layer is the glue that ensures models and services work to produce business benefits.

The top layer includes strategic, CEO-led projects in key areas, such as commercial and logistics. Cherowbrier says the organisation is also focused on using AI to support content creation, with unique messaging and insights for the modern sports fan. A crucial element here is Race Centre, an AI-powered tool developed in partnership with Infosys, which went live in March.

“We’ve got people who are motorsport evangelists who watch every single race, and they know everything about every detail of timing systems and leaderboards,” he says.

“Then other people just want this complex sport explained to them in an understandable format. What Race Centre allows us to do is to differentiate between those two types of users and what they want and then present that data to them.”

Race Centre includes a series of AI-powered features, such as Live Leaderboard, which updates race positions in real time; Generative AI Commentary, which populates automatically after each lap; and Podium Prediction, which allows fans to choose their top three finishers before the start of a race.

In addition to Infosys Topaz AI services, Cherowbrier says his organisation uses internal APIs to stream data to the platform’s models. He acknowledges that synchronising data streams from disparate locations can be challenging. However, Race Centre is receiving good feedback.

“Before, we didn’t have a great second-screen experience,” says Cherowbrier. “The system really adds to our approach.”

He has plans to do more. Cherowbrie discusses the potential to work with Infosys and develop a digital twin that provides a digital visualisation of the race using real-time data feeds.

“A lot of organisations have digital twins, but most places that already have a system like this aren’t tracking things traveling around in circles at 200 miles an hour,” he says. “Digital twins are normally quite static. So, we’re trying to build our capability up. Ultimately, can we give an accurate definition of where the car is, where all 20 cars are at any moment in time, using the data sources available to us?”

Transforming continually

Cherowbrier reflects on his role and says there’ll be more plates to spin during the next year or so. Most notably, the fourth-generation all-electric race car is set to debut in next season’s championship, with 600kW (or 815bhp) output. Presenting this power upgrade to fans in new, innovative ways brings fresh challenges.

“Gen Four is one of the fastest EV cars you’ll ever see,” he says. “It has incredible acceleration, but also a quite impressive top-line speed. So, it’s about, ‘How do we tell that story authentically and really well?’. And that means scaling some of the things we do. Nearly 600 million people are watching at home, and we have plenty of fans coming to our races.”

Cherowbrier says the almost constant technology-enabled change in his sport and across business more generally creates new requirements for CTOs and CIOs. While effective digital leaders used to be chief engineers, today’s successful technology executives are enablers.

“Successful CTOs are like a ‘continually transforming officer’,” he says. “That role is about setting an organisation up that can adapt to change. It’s recognising that every company is now a tech company, so we need to make sure our entire organisation can use digital. We become more of an enabler to everyone else in the organisation than just the IT department.”