Aipex’s Eddie Bernardon on why AI belongs in the passenger seat

Racing in the blood

Bernardon’s affection for motorsport is not theoretical. He grew up in Indianapolis, raised by Italian parents who didn’t care much for American team sports but loved racing – and Mario Andretti in particular. “I’ve always had it in my blood,” he says, casually name-checking the Scots he’s met along the way, from Jackie Stewart’s generation to Susie Wolff, who he once had on his podcast. Racing, it turns out, is a surprisingly small world.

That world eventually pulled him from General Motors to MIT’s Draper Laboratory, where he worked on robotics and control systems. Draper, better known for missile guidance, briefly tried to go commercial by building robots to make clothes. “T-shirts, jeans – flexible materials,” Bernardon recalls. “Then we realized there was more money in carbon fibre.”

That insight led to Vistagy, a software business specializing in composite design, which found an unlikely proving ground in Formula One. “Aerospace moves slowly,” he says. “Formula One breaks things in days.” It worked. Siemens acquired the business and Bernardon went on to become VP of motorsports there, straddling F1, Nascar, IndyCar and the FIA.

The lesson stuck: racing isn’t just entertainment. It’s where technology gets stress-tested at speed.

Why autonomous racing wasn’t the answer

Aipex initially dipped into autonomous racing, competing in the Autonomous Racing League. The spectacle was impressive – “Formula One-class paddocks, fan zones, the whole thing” – but something didn’t quite land.

“I’m not convinced computer race cars are ever going to compete with Formula One or IndyCar,” Bernardon says. “People want the drama of the human. The mistakes. It’s like chess – computers beat humans years ago, but nobody wants to watch computers play each other.”

So Aipex pulled back. Not because AI isn’t relevant to racing, but because removing humans entirely misses the point. Instead, the company pivoted toward something more nuanced: putting AI and automation into human-driven cars.

The metaphor is not subtle and Bernardon leans into it. AI, he argues, should behave more like a “guardian angel” than a replacement. Dial it up if you’re a rookie. Dial it down if you’re David Coulthard. Let humans stay at the centre.

Enter McLaren – and what that actually means

That philosophy now plays out most visibly through Aipex’s work with McLaren Racing, specifically within McLaren’s customer racing ecosystem. This isn’t Formula One’s frontline team, but it is elite motorsport: professional drivers, serious machinery and races that run alongside F1 weekends, including Miami.

When Aipex races in the McLaren series, it operates like any other team. Same cars. Same rules. Same pressure. But behind the scenes, the relationship opens doors.

McLaren customer racing sits in a valuable middle ground. It’s close enough to the pinnacle of the sport to carry prestige, but flexible enough to act as a laboratory. For Aipex, it provides credibility, access and a platform for partners. For McLaren, it’s a way to explore how AI agents, automation and data might support performance without undermining the human craft that defines racing.

Extreme environments, real-world lessons

This is where the marketing relevance starts to sharpen.

Aipex works with brands across sensors, lidar, radar, compute and software – companies that want to test products in conditions far harsher than the real world usually allows. Racing offers exactly that. “If you can make something work at 200 miles per hour, inches apart, you can probably make it work on the highway,” Bernardon says.

That makes Aipex part racing team, part R&D partner. But it also makes it a marketing platform. “In the end, you want to sell more stuff,” Bernardon says, recalling his time at Siemens. “But racing lets you do that in ways white papers never will.”

He tells a familiar but still eye-opening story from Formula One: one sponsor spending tens of millions a year justified it simply by comparing sales teams that attended race weekends versus those that didn’t. The difference? 20-30% higher close rates. “Give me three days,” Bernardon shrugs. “The roar of the engines, the smell of the brakes, good hospitality. That’s how deals get done.”

AI agents, not chatbots

Where Aipex is heading next is less about dashboards and more about decision-making. Bernardon talks animatedly about AI agents that could support race strategy – not replacing engineers, but helping teams sift through terabytes of data in seconds.

“A Formula One team has 50 or 60 people involved in split-second decisions,” he says. “Different people need different data, at different levels. That’s not a chatbot problem.”

The same logic, he argues, applies well beyond racing – to factories, supply chains and any environment where humans and machines work together under pressure. Racing just makes the problem clearer, faster and more visible.

CES, cars and the ‘living room on wheels’

CES, Bernardon notes, is reflecting a broader shift. Where once autonomous cars were pitched through sensors and compute power, now they’re framed as experiences. Honda and Sony’s Afeela launch barely mentioned autonomy. Instead, it focused on soundscapes, entertainment and what Bernardon calls “the living room on wheels.”

“That’s the real change,” he says. “It’s not about the technology. It’s about what it does for people.”

The marketing takeaway

For marketers, Bernardon’s message is refreshingly unfussy. Racing remains a powerful canvas because it sits at the intersection of performance, emotion and innovation. AI doesn’t change that – it amplifies it.

“The trick,” he says, “is thinking about the fans you have now, and the fans you want next. Gen Z, Gen Alpha. How do you make this exciting for them without losing what made it special in the first place?”

Aipex’s answer is not to remove humans, but to give them new things to do – and new stories to tell. In a week at CES dominated by machines trying to look more human, Bernardon offers the inverse: technology designed to make human endeavor even more compelling.

It’s a reminder that creativity doesn’t just live in agencies and studios. Sometimes it’s wearing racing overalls, standing next to a McLaren and quietly insisting that progress only works if people stay in the driver’s seat.