Winning with AI
Athena Pathway Sets Sail with AI
Athena Pathway Sets Sail with AI
We partnered with a groundbreaking women’s team to achieve a sea change in championship yacht racing.
The Aspiration
As they prepared to compete in the first-ever Women’s America’s Cup yacht race, the team from Athena Pathway, a UK organization devoted to bringing greater diversity to the world of high-performance sailing, turned to us for cutting-edge assistance from AI tools, advanced analytics, and related support.
The Impact
We developed customized deep-learning AI models that served as “digital twins” of the team’s AC40s yachts. The AI-powered system pulled 6 million data observations from sensors placed around the boats, enabling the team to augment its on-water training with virtual training sessions that simulated a wide range of scenarios. This allowed them to determine optimal tactics and strategy for many different sailing situations.
As for the race results, in a 10-team field the Athena Pathway team made it through to the one-race “ultimate jeopardy” final, losing by just eight seconds to Italy’s Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli team.
“AI has been a huge part of our training, [and] when I look at what Bain has been doing with us I’ve never had a partnership quite like it.”
