The Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) and Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) have solidified their collaboration to further accelerate the rapid adoption of data, analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI) at the Defense Department (DoD).
The CDAO and DIU signed a memo on June 4 that codifies a “necessary partnership to ensure expeditious, mission-oriented implementation of commercially available data, computation, software, and AI technologies.”
“CDAO and DIU are natural teammates in advancing DoD’s adoption of innovative digital capabilities … This partnership will help us help our commercial partners to scale their impact, fast,” DIU Director, Doug Beck, said in a statement.
“CDAO’s leadership in driving enterprise-level architecture, tools, and policy makes them an invaluable partner in DIU’s core mission of bringing commercial capability to the warfighter with the focus, speed, and scale required to deter major conflict, or win if forced to fight,” he added.
The memo covers four areas of collaboration between the CDAO and DIU: scaling commercial AI into DoD; accelerating autonomy development and fielding; experimenting with digital technologies for DoD’s Combined Joint All Domain Command & Control effort; and collaborating on department-level policy and governance efforts to accelerate AI and autonomy development, and fielding and digital technologies adoption.
“The close partnership with DIU will enable us to bring the best of industry into our enterprise infrastructure to provide crucial digital and AI capabilities,” said CDAO Radha Plumb. “DIU’s mission and proven track record in identifying and adopting commercial technologies will allow CDAO to further accelerate the adoption of data, analytics, and [AI] getting the best tech capabilities into the hands of our warfighters.”
Beck and Plumb signed the memo at DIU headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.
