Pentagon seeks commercial solutions to get its data ready for AI

The Pentagon's Joint Artificial Intelligence Center is recruiting businesses to help prepare military data for use with AI. The solicitation released March 31 is a sign of the AI office's shifting role from product developer to provider of AI readiness services for Defense Department components. The basic ordering agreement would allow those components and federal partners to issue task orders for the work to get data in shape for artificial intelligence -- that could include everything from capturing data to sorting it for storage to modeling how employees will use it with AI to get better insights. The Data Readiness for Artificial Intelligence Development (DRAID) Services ordering agreement will "help the DoD and Government users prepare data for use in AI applications by providing an easily accessible path to access the cutting-edge commercial services needed to meet the complex technical challenges involved in preparing data for AI," the solicitation read. "The services addressed by the DRAID span the entire AI data preparation lifecycle, from data ingestion, through labeling, right up to before model training begins," an April 1 blog post from the JAIC states.