Williams hires Smith for F1's AI battleground

Williams has appointed Dr James Smith as chief information officer in a newly created senior leadership role that James Vowles says is central to Formula 1’s growing battle over data and AI.

The Grove team has turned to a technology specialist with more than a decade of experience across Google, DeepMind and Human Native AI as it pushes to make information systems a bigger competitive weapon. Williams said Smith previously built Android’s data platform, a system it said is used by more than 3,000 engineers and has informed performance decisions across three billion devices.

Williams team principal James Vowles said the hire reflects how quickly the competitive picture is changing away from purely traditional racing departments. “Success in Formula 1 has always been about combining technological innovation with the best people to deliver on track,” Vowles said. “With the technology developing at breakneck pace, the latest battleground in F1 is the ability to harness data and AI across all parts of the team.”

Vowles said Smith’s background made him a natural fit for that shift. He said Smith had spent his career at that frontier at Google, DeepMind and in building his own company, adding that Williams is continuing to put technology at the heart of its ambition to compete at the very front.

Smith said he was joining at a point when data and AI are becoming increasingly important to performance on and off the track. He said Williams’ history mattered, but the bigger attraction was “the ambition for the next phase: building the systems, products and culture needed to compete at the front of the grid.” He added that he wants to help the team “move quickly, use AI pragmatically, and turn complex ideas into practical advantage.”

The appointment is another key addition to Williams’ leadership as the team continues investing across the organization in its rebuild. That effort has been reflected in a run of recent hires in key areas, but this move makes clear that Williams sees digital capability as a core part of its performance model rather than a support function.

That matters because Williams is still trying to climb from eighth place in the 2026 constructors’ championship, with seven points from the opening five rounds, and is betting that better use of data and AI can help close the gap to the front.