How McKinsey built a world-class AI sailor
America’s Cup defender Emirates Team New Zealand teamed up with McKinsey & Company ahead of this year’s race. Together, they developed a world-class sailor — and it isn’t human.
A race of technology as much as skill
The America’s Cup is the oldest international trophy in sport and it has always been a race of technology as much as sailing. The first winner — a vessel called ‘America’ — introduced innovations radical to its time like using cotton instead of hemp sails. Today’s advanced sailboats makes one wonder whether they are boats at all. The boats this year are 75-foot monohulls called the AC75 that “fly” up to two meters above the water.
Pursuing ideal design through AI
See how the engineers, designers, and sailors of Emirates Team New Zealand used AI to create ideal hydrofoils.
Hyperspeed with hydrofoils
Hydrofoils are structures fixed to the hull that lift the entire craft out of the water, enabling it to reach speeds exceeding 60 mph, or 100 kph. The hydrofoils are one part of the boat where the ‘Class Rule’ allows for design modifications, which offer huge competitive advantages for the teams that get those modifications right.
Turning to simulators
The simulator had been key to Emirates Team New Zealand’s victory in 2017; the sailors had used it to test new boat designs without having to actually build them. McKinsey migrated the simulator and developed an infrastructure to run it in the cloud; a new and innovative approach called deep reinforcement learning was then used to essentially teach the AI bot how to become a professional sailor. The technology has applications for many industries.
Quick facts
“When you start, the AI agent knows nothing and learns by trial and error using countless variables—wind speed, direction, adjustments to the 14 different sail and boat controls…if you coach it to learn in the right way, it compresses into hours what would take a human years to understand.” Nic Hohn, Senior Expert, QuantumBlack
Once the bot demonstrated that it could consistently produce results comparable to the human sailors, Emirates Team New Zealand’s engineers started using the bot to test hydrofoil designs. This substantially improved the odds of finding the optimal hydrofoil design.
“This was the critical unlock—the ability to take the sailors’ schedules out of the equation and test designs 24/7 on rapid repeat.” Helen Mayhew, Chief Operating Officer for Europe at QuantumBlack, a McKinsey company.
Experts on artificial intelligence in America’s Cup
How artificial intelligence is shaping sports and beyond
Oliver Fleming, chief operating officer of QuantumBlack in Australia, highlights how the New Zealand America’s Cup team’s performance proves that artificial intelligence can shape the world of sports and beyond.
What were the challenges in developing an AI sailor?
Nicolas Hohn, senior expert in QuantumBlack, identifies the challenges in building an AI sailor and how the team overcame these challenges.
The business case for artificial intelligence
Jenny Child, partner in McKinsey’s Sydney office, and Australia and New Zealand lead for McKinsey’s consumer and retail work, discusses how businesses can be inspired by the New Zealand America’s Cup team’s use of analytics and artificial intelligence to build new capabilities.
Teaching AI to sail like a world-class sailor and what it means for business
To help Emirates Team New Zealand defend their America’s Cup title, a new sailor was introduced: a McKinsey-built AI bot. Join Oliver Fleming, Helen Mayhew, and Nicolas Hohn from QuantumBlack, a McKinsey company, as they discuss the exciting and challenging work that has gone behind training a ‘digital twin’ – an AI bot within a simulator – using reinforcement learning to help Emirates Team New Zealand find the best hydrofoil design.
