Accenture Intelligent Mobility

Accenture Intelligent Mobility (AIM) is working with transport authorities to drive a paradigm shift to proactive safety. The solution helps transport engineers and planners to detect safety risk at road intersections and diagnose the root cause before people are killed or seriously injured.

Duration

9 months

Role

Innovation Designer

(Interaction & Service Design)

Design Team

1 x Design Director

1 x Design Lead
1 x Service Designer
1 x Visual Designer

Team

1 x Innovation Lead

1 x Business Analyst

1 x Business Intern

2 x Data Scientists

2 x Technologists

Client

Broward Metropolitan Planning Organisation &

Florida Department of Transportation

Challenge

Mobility systems around the world are under immense pressure — aging infrastructure, shifting travel patterns, climate imperatives, and fragmented data ecosystems make transport safety increasingly complex. Despite huge investments, road safety remains largely reactive: interventions happen only after people are seriously injured or killed. In Florida alone, eight people die on the road every day — the equivalent of a plane crash every month. Our challenge was to help authorities break this reactive cycle and create tools that detect risk before tragedy occurs, by turning disconnected data into actionable intelligence that supports proactive decision-making.

Objective

The ambition was to enable transport agencies to move from reactive recovery to proactive prevention. We set out to explore how new sensing technologies, computer vision, and data integration could reveal “near-misses” — moments when crashes almost happened — and transform them into new indicators of road risk. By combining these insights with contextual data such as weather, speed, and volume, the goal was to empower traffic safety engineers to see hidden patterns, predict emerging danger zones, and design interventions that make roads safer for all users. The pilot would serve as proof of concept for a scalable, data-driven approach to proactive safety — with a patent now pending.

Research Insights

Having safety as our focus along with awareness of the challenges that characterise transport systems, the goal of our research with Broward County was to gain an understanding of the key issues and opportunities around the use of technology & data for enhancing transport safety in Broward County. The following insights, distilled from conversations with members of key transport organisations, reflect the main cross-organisational issues experienced around the use of data and new technology for safety.

The Case for proactive road safety

USDOT shift towards Proactive Safety

The USDOT, through the National Roadways Safety Strategy (NRSS) has adopted proactive safety as a core principle and launched a new RFI exploring dynamic sensing technology – recognizing the role that new technology can play in making safety more proactive.

The scale of the challenge is immense

More than 750,000 crashes occur in Florida every year. 3,800 Floridians were killed in motor vehicle crashes in 2021. Florida has one of the highest rates of bicycle accidents in the nation. Each investigation requires data to be sourced, analysed and synthesised. Given the scale of the challenge, better tools could help to streamline data management, aid decision support and design safety countermeasures proactively.

Adoption is the hardest things

These ideas are not brand new. Efforts to use data to drive proactive safety has already been a priority for agencies in Florida and around the country.

From our research, the challenge has come not from the data capture – but it’s use. When new data or technology is brought into existing workflows, if they are not designed with current user's goals in mind – they will not be adopted. Our co-creation process is human centred and focuses on meeting the needs of end users.

Ideation & Conceptualisation

Building on insights from our discovery research, we moved into a highly collaborative phase of ideation and conceptualisation. Using co-creation workshops, scenario posters, and concept mapping, we translated real-world road safety challenges into tangible solution ideas. We illustrated how proactive safety could look in practice—through story-driven scenarios that highlighted the shift from reactive response to predictive prevention. These sessions helped bridge perspectives between data scientists, engineers, and transport planners, aligning them around shared opportunity areas. From these, we shaped three horizon concepts envisioning the future of intelligent mobility, defining key system features such as network-level risk ranking, near-miss detection, and contextualised data visualisation. This phase set the foundation for AIM’s core value proposition: a human-centred, data-powered tool that empowers authorities to act before accidents happen.

Service & Interaction Design

We mapped the “as-is” and “to-be” service journeys to understand how data, roles, and systems interact across the supply chain lifecycle. This work culminated in a service blueprint connecting forecasting, replenishment, and inventory monitoring around a central orchestration layer. Interaction design focused on surfacing actionable intelligence in context: dashboards revealing network-wide stock patterns, root cause trails linking data to decisions, and simulation tools for forecasting “what-if” scenarios. Each feature was anchored in cognitive simplicity—AI insights presented as transparent, explainable prompts rather than opaque automation.

Desirability & Usability Testing

We conducted multiple rounds of desirability and usability testing with traffic safety engineers and planners to refine how data could be experienced meaningfully. Through iterative feedback cycles, we explored the most intuitive ways to visualise complex analytics—designing dashboards, spatial maps, and interaction flows that balanced depth of insight with ease of use. Each iteration brought us closer to a solution that was not only functionally robust but also desirable and trusted by the people who would rely on it daily.

Stakeholder Workshop

To prepare for the pilot, we conducted a multi-agency stakeholder workshop in Florida, bringing together representatives from the Broward Metropolitan Planning Organization, Florida Department of Transportation, and Broward County. The session focused on defining shared pilot goals, aligning on scope, and prioritizing parameters such as location, cost, ownership, and data integration. We also demoed the AIM prototype to gather collective feedback, validate usability across roles, and ensure that the pilot plan reflected the real needs and operational realities of those who would bring it to life.

Impact

The AIM project not only reframed how transport authorities think about road safety but also proved the value of human-centered innovation in data-heavy domains. What began as a design-led pilot in Broward County evolved into a scalable, patent-pending safety intelligence platform with real commercial traction. AIM secured a $575,000 pre-pilot engagement and a $5 million pilot phase with Broward MPO, establishing a blueprint for proactive safety transformation across Florida. The initiative has since expanded into multiple states, with opportunities under development in California, Georgia, Ohio, and Texas, reflecting its growing market relevance. Recognized with multiple international design awards, AIM demonstrates how design can unlock commercial value while driving systemic impact - turning near-miss analytics into life-saving insights and positioning data-led safety as a new standard for public infrastructure.