Performance is never an accident. Performance is designed.

I learned this early in my career working around high-performance compute systems. The compute was never the whole story, it was the airflow, the memory channels, the network hops, the schedulers. One weak link and the whole thing bottlenecks. Years later I realized the same thing is true in enterprise technology, and honestly, it’s the same principle behind an F1 car.

In F1, you don’t win on horsepower alone. You win because the chassis, aerodynamics, brakes, telemetry, and pit crew are all tuned to the same purpose. One part out of sync ruins the lap. One bottleneck costs you the race. You can’t improvise your way to a podium, you earn speed by building foundations the right way.

But here’s what people forget about F1. The driver doesn’t build the car. The driver’s job is to push the limits of what the engineering team built. The engineering team designs the chassis, tunes the aerodynamics, calibrates the telemetry, and makes sure the car can handle whatever the driver throws at it. Neither wins alone.

That’s the relationship between IT and the business. The business is the driver. They know the track, they know the customers, they make the split-second calls on strategy. IT is the engineering team. We build the car, we tune the systems, we make sure the architecture responds when the driver pushes harder.

Here’s what’s happening right now with AI. The car just got significantly faster. The ERP platforms, cloud infrastructure, data warehouses, identity layers, AI-powered tooling, all of it has created a machine with capabilities that didn’t exist two years ago. But the drivers don’t fully understand yet how fast they can actually push. The car can handle more than most business teams realize, and the gap between what’s possible and what’s being asked for is the biggest opportunity sitting on the table.

The organizations that will win aren’t the ones with the best AI tools. They’re the ones where the driver trusts the engineering team, pushes the car to its limits, and the engineering team keeps making the car faster every lap.

Build the car. Trust the car. Then push it.

Push push!