F1 Arcade is utilising consumer data to create a personalised guest journey and will consider how AI can enhance the social gaming experience alongside increasing business productivity.
“The most important thing for us, is to and be as true to life, to F1, as possible,” chief technology officer, Gavin Williams told MCA’s Hostech conference last week.
The official Formula 1 concept combines full-motion racing simulators with a food and cocktail offering, with sites in London, Birmingham and new openings set for Boston and Washington DC in the US.
First launching in 2022, Williams said it has been important to build on a solid simulated-racing fan base.
“We try to simplify everything as much as possible and ensure we have a game that will work for everybody.
Building data around the social circles entering its venues, is not only enhancing communication, but also improving the guest journey and its product.
Encouraging guests to sign up to access game play, the business can obtain far reaching data points.
“If you come with your friends, we have your data and your friends’ data.
“That is not something that typically happens in a hospitality environment, where we usually just have a lead booker.”
He added, “We’re not doing it just to advertise and market to people, but to continuously drive the product and engagement.
Williams also shared the business’ three-pronged AI strategy, comprising productivity, operational intelligence and engagement.
It is running an inter-departmental pilot to understand the potential for artificial intelligence within the business.
F1’s engineering team has access to an enterprise grade version of ChatGPT, which it is “actively using” to ideate, write technical requirements, and create diagrams.
“We have come up with this concept of a junior AI developer, that we are calling Alex,” says Williams.
“When we are onboarding new engineers, we can use it to guide them, which is really useful”, especially as the business builds its US workforce.
It is also considering how AI can enhance gameplay.
“It is legitimately really exciting, but it is really early days for businesses to adopt this internally, if they don’t have their own development teams,” says Williams.
“I see this slowly infecting the industry, if not out of choice, it will just happen, but everyone will feel the benefits.”
Another key area of development was understanding better how to increase dwell time.
“When we started looking at the concept, we liked the idea of allowing people to book a table after they race,” however Williams says the layout of venues is not always optimally set up for this.
“We are learning how best to optimise that experience”, he adds, with the first step to harness booking software to build better logic around booking times, and pricing.
With its upcoming site in Boston to include a large-scale events space, “It is going to be interesting to see how we can evolve our offering to increase that dwell time, and even how we modify the gameplay as well.”
