An official with the Defense Department’s (DoD) Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) outlined what he called the office’s planned “big plays” for the rest of fiscal year 2024 during a Jan. 31 AI Acquisition Forum hosted by ACT-IAC.
“Throughout the department you’ll find more money and more requirements going towards AI, all things digital, all things emerging tech and so we really have to be smarter buyers and also collaborate more,” said Quentin McCoy, the CDAO’s director of procurement.
He said the CDAO’s main procurement goals include:
- Operationalize the CDAO procurement office;
- Accelerate delivery of AI/machine learning, digital, and data solutions through Tradewinds to expand innovation procurement offerings;
- Implement and institutionalize novel contracting strategies for procurement of emerging technologies;
- Prototype emerging technology solutions for acquisition business processes; and
- Baseline, prioritize, and implement CDAO enterprise standards.
“So there are a couple of things that we have to do within those big plays,” he explained. “We’re working with industry partners … the way we do testing across the different tools, AI tools and capabilities.”
McCoy also talked about progress on work within Task Force Lima, which was created last year to develop, evaluate, and recommend the responsible and secure implementation of generative AI capabilities across DoD.
“We received over 100 white papers, and we are still filtering through,” he said. “Those are 100 use cases of how we can use AI to help support mission warfighters and it really showed us that we really don’t have a clue of what [large language model] LLMs are and how AI can be used.”
“But the demand signal for it in industry was so high that we will really be able to leverage it and be successful, and we’re rapidly beginning to experiment with it,” he said.
