Ford Motor Company Receives 2025 Innovative Applications in Analytics Award

The INFORMS Analytics Society, in partnership with Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and Adelphi University, announced the winners of the 2025 Innovative Applications in Analytics Award (IAAA) at the 2025 INFORMS Analytics+ Conference in Indianapolis. IAAA recognizes novel applications of analytics that have had a significant impact on organizations and society.

A team from the Ford Motor Company took home first place, which was announced during a special luncheon during the 2025 INFORMS Analytics+ Conference. The winning project, “Optimizing Product Feature Offering through Connected Vehicles Analytics, Intelligent Sampling, and Generative AI,” was presented by Vamsee Krishna Batchu, Data Science Manager, Industrial Systems Analytics; Omar Makke, Ford Technical Expert, Connected Vehicle Analytics; Oleg Gusikhin, Senior Manager, Supply Chain Analytics; Vasiliy Krivtsov, Henry Ford Technical Fellow, Global Data Insights & Analytics; Erica Klampfl, Executive Director, Industrial Systems Analytics; Vicky Svidenko, Director, Data Analytics and Prognostics; Rodney Cooper, Manager, Connected Vehicles Data; and Mare Shayrin, Data Scientist, Industrial Systems Analytics – all from Ford Motor Company.

Automakers continuously look for ways to reduce cost, while not impacting customer satisfaction in the products. By leveraging connected vehicle data, the team can determine actual use under a variety of conditions and provide insights for product development to help justify adding or removing features, or redesigning for use. The accelerated growth and heterogeneity of the data, which result from constantly releasing new vehicle models with new capabilities appealing to different audiences, poses significant challenges related to collecting statistically representative data samples for a proper study. To address these challenges, the team developed an intelligent sampling system utilizing multi-agent large language models (LLMs) to optimize data collection and analysis. This system centralizes and modularizes information retrieval for domain knowledge, signals and existing strata. One exemplary application of this system is feature rationalization, as demonstrated by the removal of the parallel park assist, which resulted in substantial cost savings for Ford Motor Company and was widely publicized by key media outlets.

For a video summary of the project, click here.

The second- and third-place winners of the 2025 IAAA competition are, respectively:

• “Innovating Manufacturing: The Autonomous Factory with Digital Twin and Reinforcement Learning for Intelligent Operations and Efficiency,” Young Jae Jang, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology; Ilhoe Hwang and Seol Hwang, DAIM Research; and Sunhee Bang, Samsung SDI

• “Optimizing the Path Towards Plastic-Free Oceans,” Yannick Pham and Bruno Sainte-Rose, The Ocean Cleanup; Jean Pauphilet and Baizhi Song, London Business School; and Dick den Hertog, University of Amsterdam and The Ocean Cleanup

The INFORMS Analytics Society, BCG and Adelphi University also recognized the outstanding applications submitted by the following finalists:

• “Spot Market Pricing on Amazon Freight” by Adam N. Elmachtoub, Goutam Kumar and Roger Lederman, Amazon
• “Semantically Grounded Analytics Engine for Helping Patients Find Doctors and Locations in a Large Healthcare Organization,” by Mayank Kejriwal and Min-Hsueh Chiu, University of Southern California; Hamid Haidarian, Andy Xiang, Deep Shrestha and Faizan Javed, Kaiser Permanente Digital

• “Leveraging AI for AI, Auxiliary Models to Sustain a Customer Facing Chatbot,” by Fabio Dutra Sarti, Safa Shamout, Mohan Mulakkamparambil, Andres Villegas Ceballos, Antonio Henrique and Rafal Orlowski, Scotiabank

The IAAA winners and finalists highlight the transformative power of analytics across diverse fields and the significant contributions of individuals and teams in pushing the boundaries of analytical innovation. The submissions were evaluated accordingly for their rigorous methodologies, impactful results and creative problem-solving.