The Defense Department (DoD) has appointed Douglas Matty as the Pentagon’s new chief digital and AI officer (CDAO), an agency spokesperson told MeriTalk.
With nearly 30 years of service as a commissioned officer in the U.S. Army, Matty has held a wide range of leadership roles throughout his career.
Most recently, he served on the Army’s AI Task Force, initially as the deputy director when the task force was established under Army Futures Command in 2018 to support the DoD’s Joint AI Center. In September 2020, he was promoted to director of the task force, a position he held until December 2022.
While in the Army, Matty also served an operations research systems analyst in the Office of the Deputy Under Secretary of the Army for Business Transformation, and as a deputy director for U.S. Cyber Command’s Capabilities Development Group.
After his career in the Army, Matty spent some time in the private sector and academia where he furthered his expertise on defense applications for data, analytics and AI. Most recently, he served as the director of AI for contested logistics at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
Matty becomes the third leader of the Pentagon’s AI Office. Craig Martell served first, starting in April 2022 after the office’s unofficial launch in January of that year. He was succeeded by Radha Plumb, who stepped down in mid-January 2025. Principal Deputy Margie Palmieri has been heading up the office on an interim basis since then.