Rokt has partnered with Oracle Red Bull Racing for our years. The connection goes deeper than a logo on a car. Both organizations make real-time decisions where fractions of a second determine the outcome. During the Canadian Grand Prix weekend in Montreal, we brought together four-time Formula One World Champion and Oracle Red Bull Racing driver Max Verstappen, Oracle Red Bull Racing CEO and Team Principal Laurent Mekies, and Rokt co-founder and CEO Bruce Buchanan to compare how they approach those moments. Max went on to finish second in the Canadian Grand Prix, adding a podium to a weekend spent talking about what happens behind results like that.
The Moment That Matters Most is a two-part video series about making decisions in environments rich with data and short on time. Oracle Red Bull Racing interprets thousands of signals from a Formula One car while Max experiences its performance at speed. Rokt tackles a different version of that challenge in ecommerce, where the Rokt Brain uses AI to determine the next best action for each customer in real time during the Transaction Moment™, from cart through confirmation.
Episode 1: When data meets instinct
Three laps into a preseason test in Barcelona, Max returned to the garage and told the team something was wrong with the car. The data hadn’t revealed the problem yet. “We all scratched our heads. We could see absolutely nothing,” Laurent recalls. The team kept investigating and found the issue.
For Laurent, what happened next shows why data and driver input work together. “You cannot separate data from driver input,” he says. “You really need both to understand and to identify the car limitations.” Max is experiencing the car while generating the data the team analyzes, giving the engineers additional context for what they see.
Bruce approaches that question of context from a different perspective.
You can have a wealth of information, but the ability to tie it together with context, particularly cross-domain context, is incredibly powerful.
At Rokt, the Rokt Brain learns from billions of transactions, using signals available in the moment to determine the next best action for each individual customer.
The episode goes further into how experience develops, when to trust what you’re seeing, and why testing an idea can reveal more than debating it from a distance.
Episode 2: When seconds matter
The second conversation starts at the pit stop, one of the most time-sensitive moments in a Formula One race. Laurent says the crew may have around 20 seconds of warning before Max brings the car into the pit box, followed by roughly two seconds to change all four tires and make any planned adjustments to the car.
Race strategy moves just as quickly.
You have all these brilliant ideas and plans, and then sometimes after one corner they can all go in the bin.
Max says. The team prepares extensively, but it also needs the freedom to respond as new information arrives.
That leads Laurent and Bruce into a broader conversation about how organizations preserve speed as they grow. Laurent describes the temptation to add another process every time something goes wrong. Bruce talks about keeping teams close to decisions and learning through testing rather than extended internal debate.
Rokt faces its own seconds-long window in ecommerce, less than 200ms to be precise. A customer moves through the Transaction Moment in real time, and the Rokt Brain uses the signals available in that moment to determine the next best action for that individual. The technology has to make the transaction more relevant while the customer is still in it.
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