Pentagon artificial intelligence boss says real data to guide work

After more than 100 days on the job, the U.S. Department of Defense's top artificial intelligence official said Thursday that the office's strategy will take a down-up approach and start with data. "It's true that most of my career has been in AI, but I don't think most of my work here at DoD will be about AI," Craig Martell, the Pentagon's first Chief Digital and AI Officer, said at the 2022 Intelligence & National Security Summit in National Harbor, Maryland. The Pentagon tapped Martell, a former head of machine learning at Lyft, to oversee its AI efforts this spring. The office subsumed multiple other defense digital authorities, including the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center and the Defense Digital Services, and reached full operational capability on June 1. While much of the talk about the CDAO has focused on its role as the Pentagon's leading AI authority, Martell said more attention and energy needs to be paid to data, which he said serves as the basis of the office's "hierarchy of needs."