Flight Path is a Wing series for AI startup founders that draws on candid conversations with C-suite executives at leading corporations and unpacks what it takes to become a trusted AI partner in a variety of different industries.
The government is a beast to work with, according to National Security Executive Lori Wade. “That’s not a classified fact, by the way. That’s truth,” she jokes. For any aspiring vendor, the intimidation factor is high, and for someone approaching a government agency with a tech solution, regulations and layers of systems make the way in difficult to see.
Wade has advice. She’s spent more than 25 years in the U.S. government and knows which kinds of partnerships are successful and which aren’t. And she has high hopes for what AI can do for the entire intelligence community, as long as it’s implemented carefully. For businesses that want to bring AI solutions to the government, she says that forging partnerships built on a foundation of solid technology and quality data is the way forward.
We talked to Lori about how she sees public and private partnerships working in the age of AI.
Q: You’ve been working in the U.S. government since 1998, so you've seen waves of digital transformation over the last 25 or so years. What have you learned in the course of navigating those changes that you are drawing on now in the age of AI?
Lori Wade: When we look across any new technology, we have to look across every aspect of the acquisition, our security process for how we bring new tech into the Intelligence Community, and then also understand what the ultimate application of it is going to be. And so defining all of that upfront is very important.
The biggest paradigm shift is to see it from a data-centric versus a system-centric view. That matters, because everything that you think that you want to do with AI and building models is based on the data and having quality data.
I’ve been trying to create a different view of how we work with the private sector — to not just think of them as vendors, but how we bring them in to help us solve big problems. And I’ve been talking a lot with the gaming community, because if you think about how gaming is done, how they create that experience for the gamer, and everything that they’ve had to do, how they continue to evolve the experience, is what I’m trying to put into place for our users. Everything that they do from a commercial side for the user, we could learn from.
Q: What are you most excited about in this current phase of AI and technology?
A lot of the modeling and simulation, and other ways in which we can use AI can help with faster deployment of strategy against targets and others. We have a lot of what I call Operation SCFF, which is “Operation Swivel Chair Fat Finger,” where I think that technology can help us as we go. Using AI to help us with that, and at the speed of which decisions need to be made and with accuracy, I think there’s great opportunity.
We have to balance the threat and the opportunity, and the opportunity is incredible. The Intelligence Community is very closed. But if we make better decisions about the data, and we understand that here’s data that we can work with in the open, we can maybe do more in the unclassified realm. So it offers an opportunity. The idea of data ownership and data privacy, and what that looks like with the next evolution of the internet, and even how we train and how we can carry out our mission, there’s a great opportunity to do that.
Q: Do you have any advice for someone who is looking to build a solution for the government? What’s the best way to approach working with you as a partner?
I call it “Real Talk with Lori.” When I engage with a vendor — I'm not talking about the largest ones that are out there in this business or even small ones — it's not helpful when they come in and talk to leaders in the government about where they are now, because it looks very shiny and glitzy and amazing, and I call it “automagic.”
But to get it to work at scale, we really need to know all of the foundational work that needs to be done. What is the actual investment that is needed? We need to understand how it’s going to work in our environment and then plan for that.
And some of these things are based in science and algorithms, so there aren’t shortcuts. If there are shortcuts, then we need to understand what they are. But the advice I have is: When you interact with us, we need real talk. It’s not helpful to come in and say, “Look how great it is.”
The other thing people don’t realize is that from an Intelligence Community and from a data standpoint, not only do we care about what we’re doing from the point of collection or acquisition of data, we have to worry about it all the way through to disposition of that data. And there are governing bodies and laws about what all that looks like. And then how do we automate that?
Q: It sounds like a fairly major cultural shift that you’re attempting to push through. How are you getting the buy-in that these are problems worth focusing on?
Well, that’s where I think the years of experience come in. I think I’m just really focused on staying true to the missions we’re trying to solve and never losing focus of how we’re trying to solve them. And that mindset needs to change, to look at that data-centric experience, because at the end of the day what we’re trying to do is unlock mission value and insight and take action on it.
And we need to do it in a way that we’ve never had to do it in the past. And the technology is no longer just about the volume of the data we have. More data is not always better. The right data is better. And how are we using the technology in a way that we’ve never been able to before?
