Former CDAO says Pentagon focus on AI will push industry to improve

AIAA SCITECH FORUM, ORLANDO, Fla. — Industry should “double down” on verifying and validating the artificial intelligence capabilities it produces, the DOD’s former chief digital and artificial intelligence officer said today.

During a keynote session here, Craig Martell, now chief technology officer at Lockheed Martin, said “industry has kind of punted the evaluation” of these technologies to the customer.

“Imagine we built an F-35 and we shift it and we say, “OK, it’s up to you to figure out whether it works well or not.’ Imagine we shift the Artemis capsule and we say, ‘It’s up to you whether it works well or not.’ We wouldn’t do that,” he told the audience. “That would not be doing our job.”

“But in AI, for some reason, there’s a comfort in being able to shift this model,” he said.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth this week announced Cameron Stanley will serve as the next CDAO. Hegseth also announced a “barrier removal SWAT team” in the Pentagon to accelerate adoption of AI capabilities.

Martell during his keynote said the value of Hegseth’s acceleration of AI “is to push industry to help us all get better at figuring out when and where it’s useful.”

He said industry should “double down” on ensuring the accuracy of the AI tools it offers.

“The thing you shift to your customer, particularly in a defense environment, is up to you to get correct,” Martell said.

And there’s no magic to AI, he told the audience. “It’s just a statistical technology,” Martell added. “If you have the right data and the right use case, sometimes it works.”

“You can’t have AI without knowing whether you’re getting the answer right or wrong,” he said. “We need to train our people on how to evaluate when and where this tool is useful.”