January 31, 2026: China battery giant CATL has secured a World Economic Forum award for its use of AI-driven technologies to transform battery research and development.
The WEF presented its MINDS award for ‘augmented intelligence leading next-generation lithium ion battery design’ to CATL at WEF’s annual meeting in Davos on January 19.
CATL said its platform predicts cell behaviour and speeds up next-gen Li development, replacing manual trial-and-error methods with an AI-driven co-design.
The Chinese battery firm said its platform integrates best practice from across materials science, cell design, manufacturing processes and equipment.
The platform combines physics‑based electrochemical models with machine learning to deliver what CATL said are scientifically reliable predictions that speed up key steps in cell design.
Running on a private cloud, the platform draws on more than 50 million data records. With physics‑informed machine learning and ‘agentic AI’ — systems capable of working on projects with minimal human supervision — the platform works like a digital engineer, automatically generating, evaluating and refining design options.
According to CATL, its tech is trained on more than 100,000 battery design cases, drawing on 600 terabytes of test data and aftermarket data from a broad range of new energy vehicles. The platform can accommodate highly customised performance requirements, dynamically adjusting design priorities while achieving prediction accuracy of up to 95%, the firm claimed.
By evaluating designs against electrochemical constraints and applying AI-driven optimization, it generates design recommendations in seconds and virtual cell designs in minutes.
The MINDS programme, led by WEF’s Center for AI Excellence, aims to speed up responsible adoption of AI, data, and intelligent technologies for use in industrial, economic and other sectors.
Applicants were rigorously evaluated across five key areas — strategy, talent, data, technology and governance. CATL was one of 15 organizations selected for recognition this year.
WEF said: “By transforming battery cell design into a fully data-driven process, CATL is changing how next-generation EV batteries are developed. CATL (has) turned a deep reservoir of proprietary, multimodal data into a sustained AI advantage.”
Ni Jun, chief manufacturing officer and co-president of CATL’s engineering manufacturing system division, said: “In complex industrial scenarios like battery production, relying solely on AI cannot solve core problems.”
Ni said he is pushing for increased use of augmented intelligence to give engineers an in-depth understanding of material properties, process principles and system engineering in developing next-generation batteries.
