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Fast Company
08-08-2025
- Automotive
- Fast Company
How Formula E made EV racing a global phenomenon
IMPACT COUNCIL It built a faster, more exciting sport—with 500 million people now watching. The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of top leaders and experts who pay dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership, and more. BY Listen to this Article More info 0:00 / 5:55 As U.S. climate policy was noisily dismantled in Washington over the spring and summer, another climate story unfolded—quieter, faster, and broadcast to millions. It unfolded in the streets of Monaco. São Paulo. Shanghai. In the form of all-electric race cars tearing through city centers—cheered on by fans living the transition to a low-carbon world, not waiting for it. Formula E: A global entertainment platform Launched just over a decade ago, Formula E now reaches half a billion fans—many of whom are new to motorsports. Not because it promised sustainability. But because it delivered a better product: short, high-drama races. Urban venues. A streaming-ready format. Cultural relevance in an EV -first world. It's a playbook worth studying for any company trying to bring climate innovation to the mainstream. This isn't about messaging. It's about strategy. From clunky to cutting edge When Roger Griffiths first saw a Formula E car in 2014, he wasn't impressed. A veteran of IndyCar, Le Mans, and Formula 1, he knew a lot about going fast. And this wasn't it. The battery was huge, heavy, and underpowered. The performance? Underwhelming. But Formula E wasn't starting from scratch. It was pulling from the top shelf of global motorsport. What struck him wasn't the hardware. It was the names showing up anyway: Michael Andretti, Alain Prost, and Frank Williams—legends who had built dynasties in IndyCar and Formula 1. Even Richard Branson had joined the grid. 'We can't afford (for) this to fail,' Griffiths recalled on the Supercool podcast. 'Too many people have too much invested.' Formula E didn't begin with speed or range. It started with credibility. And in the early days of climate tech, that buys you time to iterate toward something better. So they did. Designed for a new kind of fan Formula E didn't mimic Formula 1. It built a motorsport tuned to a new era. Races last just 45 minutes—tight enough for modern attention spans, long enough to create drama. The circuits run through the hearts of global cities, not remote tracks. Fans take public transit or Uber to races. The vibe? Less pilgrimage, more pop-up festival. The audience is younger, urban, and digitally native. Many aren't interested in owning a car at all. 'Young people today don't necessarily want to own cars,' said Griffiths. 'We're catering to a crowd that thinks differently about mobility. Formula E recognizes that.' Meanwhile, the technology caught up—fast. Jaguar used race-day insights to improve the range of its I-PACE SUV. BMW co-developed systems between i3 engineers and race teams. Formula E became a proving ground—not just for fans, but for the EV industry. Built to evolve Unlike legacy motorsports, Formula E gave itself permission to break with tradition. It experimented early and often: Fan Boost. Attack Mode. Interactive features lifted from gaming culture. Some flopped. Others stuck. But the league kept shipping, learning, and moving forward. 'The old me would've said, 'What a stupid idea,'' Griffiths said of Attack Mode, which gives drivers a temporary power boost if they hit a marked zone on the track. 'The new me said, 'I'm not sure—but I'll give it a go.'' Formula E doesn't wait for perfect. It tests ideas in public—on race day, with millions watching. Either way, the race goes on. The sport gets better. That mindset isn't just tolerated, it's structural. Formula E's governance enables change. Its culture rewards it. 5 lessons for climate innovators Innovators can learn these five lessons from Formula E. 1. Turn constraints into strengths. Early EVs couldn't finish a full race. Formula E shortened them to 45 minutes, creating tighter, more intense competition perfectly tuned for social media highlight reels and streaming. 2. Design for urban lifestyles. Electric cars are quiet enough to race in city centers. Fans don't need to drive. They grab an Uber and plug into the experience as part of modern life. 3. Iterate in public. Formula E doesn't hide experiments. It ships them in real time, where fans become part of the process. Innovation is part of the show. 4. Let climate be the platform, not the pitch. Sustainability underpins the whole thing. Sponsors don't need convincing. Fans don't feel preached to. That's what makes it scale. 5. Design for what's emerging. Formula E didn't retrofit old formats for electric race cars. It aligned with a modern, urban culture: streaming-first viewing and shared mobility. These behaviors define where we're heading. A better future, built for speed Formula E didn't scale by talking about emissions. It scaled by delivering an incredible fan experience. It understood how younger audiences live, move, and engage—and built a sport around that. It made the low-carbon future feel inevitable, not through fear, but through energy and excitement. And it proved something essential: Climate innovation doesn't have to trade performance for principle. It doesn't have to trade anything at all. Josh Dorfman is CEO and host of Supercool.
Fast Company
05-05-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
To realize AI's potential in the workplace, do one thing
The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership opportunities, events and more. In just a few short years, generative artificial intelligence has begun demonstrating its tremendous business potential. Stanford University's latest AI Index report reveals that global corporate investment in AI grew nearly 45% in 2024 to reach $252.3 billion. With private investment in generative AI up 8.5 times over 2022 levels, forecasts suggest that AI could soon contribute trillions of dollars to the American economy alone. By 2028, agentic AI, the next stage in AI's evolution, could be making at least 15% of day-to-day decisions at work and bring greater efficiency, productivity, and innovation. We're already seeing how AI is creating new businesses, products and services with the potential to expand access to new quality jobs and build new sources of wealth. Today, workers are using AI to inject creativity into their current jobs and start and grow their own businesses. Two-thirds of small businesses that use AI say their own employees are introducing AI tools to the workplace to improve operations, reduce costs and spark innovation. Many organizations are understandably focused on the near-term time- and cost-savings this emerging technology brings about. But pure efficiency won't unlock the true value of AI; that will require tapping into the expertise and creativity of their employees. To fully realize AI's potential to revolutionize our economy, we need to put workers at the center of the process of deciding where and how it shows up in the workplace. What does that look like in practice? AI training First, organizations should offer more AI training—from basic literacy to implementation. AI usage at work is surging, according to a new study from my team at JFF. Two years ago, only 8% of individuals used AI at work. Today, it's 35%. Those who use AI say AI is making them more efficient—and their jobs more interesting—by reducing the number of tedious tasks and allowing them to focus on more strategic and creative work. More training means more people experiencing these benefits and contributing to decision making around AI. Yet our survey also found wide training gaps. Fewer than one third (31%) of workers say their employers provide training on AI fundamentals or specific AI tools and systems. Slightly more than one third (34%) of employees not receiving AI training at work say they want their employer to offer it. This lack of access to training is creating barriers to the effective implementation of AI at work. Previous JFF research shows that nearly 60% of small businesses cited workforce readiness as the most common barrier to incorporating AI technology into their businesses. To overcome that barrier, organizations can start by providing affordable and practical AI literacy training that help employees learn how to get the most out of AI and become responsible users of this emerging technology. Employee-driven innovation Second, organizations should catalyze employee-driven innovation. Workers are already eager to use AI: according to JFF's recent survey, 20% of employees say they're taking the initiative to use AI at work in the absence of formal direction from their employers, while nearly 30% of workers are leveraging AI tools for strategic growth and innovation. There's a good business case to be made for bottom-up transformation. Research suggests that when workers are asked for their input, organizations are more likely to make effective use of AI tools and improve the quality of workers' jobs. To unlock growth using AI, businesses should involve their employees in piloting and deploying AI tools and processes across multiple roles and functions throughout an organization. Frontline employees—experts on their own workflows—are often in the best position to help improve and refine development of AI tools and processes. They're the ones companies should call on to find uses of AI that can create value and drive innovation. AI and human collaboration Finally, organizations should reconsider how their employees spend their time, the nature of the work they do, and their unique skills so they can unlock the best parts of collaboration between AI and humans. The immediate goal of AI implementation should be about enabling workers to prioritize work that creates new products, services and value that helps businesses grow. Collaboration between humans and AI has enormous potential. As a Harvard Business School working paper suggests, AI can help professionals significantly boost performance, expertise, and social connectivity in team settings. As AI becomes more capable of making its own decisions and completing complex tasks, humans will spend more time supervising AI, discerning and evaluating AI outputs, and managing interpersonal and collaborative activities with other humans. We've also seen that AI appears to significantly increase the value of human leadership in interpersonal and highly cognitive tasks like staffing organizations, building relationships, and guiding and motivating teams. Employers have an opportunity to prepare for this shift by designing high-quality jobs—and involving their workers in this process—that can get the best out of collaboration between humans and AI. The transformation of work is underway. Businesses seeking to navigate it should support employees in their earnest desire to develop AI literacy and skills, catalyze creativity and innovation throughout the organization, and intentionally redesign jobs to unlock the strengths of both AI and humans. Previous technological revolutions have shown that the benefits of progress are not distributed equally. But if companies keep their employees at the center, they can fulfill AI's potential as a force to expand access to quality jobs and economic opportunity for all.
