Selling AI is Good Business for Government Solution Provider Execs
“There’s gold in them thar hills” as spending on AI services ramps up and is projected to continue; infrastructure spending seen as needed to enable move to AI
By John P. Desmond, Editor, AI in Business
Clients of the $200 billion IT services firm Accenture were spending freely during the pandemic, but they have since pulled back, which sets the stage for the next wave of spending on AI services.
In India, head counts at Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys and HCL Technologies, shrunk in the three quarters, and at Accenture, year-on-year revenue growth has fallen for six straight quarters, according to a recent account from Reuters. Customers are looking for deals that help them cut costs and get rapid returns on investment.
However, companies are looking to move to AI, which requires an upgrade to the tech infrastructure. Currently, only about 40 percent of applications have been moved to the cloud, according to Accenture CEO Julie Sweet. Gartner estimates that spending on the cloud will rise by 70 percent to $917 billion over three years to 2025, putting it past traditional IT infrastructure spending, such as on data centers.
Accenture sold $300 million in generative AI deals this year through August, less than one percent of its $72 billion in total new bookings, Reuters reported. Those deals were reported to be $1 million on average. Mphasis, a smaller firm, reported one-third of its total contracts of $707 million for the quarter ending in June were from “pure AI deals,” although definitions of that are unenforceable.
It may be an early-stage market, but US government spending on AI contracts hit $3.3 billion in fiscal 2022, according to a study from Stanford University recently reported on in Fedscoop. The federal government’s spending on AI increased by more than $600 million in one year, up from $2.7 billion in 2021. Total spending on AI contracts increased nearly 2.5 times since 2017, when the US government spent $1.3 billion on AI, the study reported. And all that was before the dawn of generative AI, which has supercharged the market.
Top AI executives leading the charge for selling services, especially to the US federal government, were compiled in a recent account in ExecutiveGov. These included:
At Microsoft Federal, Kristen Summers, operating unit chief technology officer
The market for cloud services is extremely competitive, with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft at 31 and 22 percent shares respectively, as of 2021, according to Statista.
Summers has served in her current position since January 2022, handling Microsoft’s technology and AI businesses for the US government. Prior to joining Microsoft Federal, Summers worked as a research engineer at Thomson Corporation. In seven years at IBM, she has held increasing responsibilities with AI, data science and consulting services.
In a move this summer, Candice Ling was named Federal Sector Leader for Microsoft, succeeding Rick Wagner, who led the unit for three years, according to an account in GovCon Wire. “In this new era of government, I want to champion a public-private centered strategy, fostering co-innovation and accelerating time-to-mission,” Ling stated in a post on LInkedIn, adding for customers, “We are also dedicated to and laser-focused on accelerating AI adoption in support of your mission. “
At Lockheed Martin, Greg Forrest, Director of AI Foundations
Greg Forrest is the Director of Artificial Intelligence Foundations at Lockheed Martin, a top defense contractor and a global aerospace company headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland. He has held the position since December 2020.
As the director of AI Foundations, Greg Forrest oversees Lockheed’s AI strategy and enterprise AI system development. He leads AI and machine learning teams that develop transformative capabilities for the company and its clients.
Greg Forrest brings experience in research and development programs, communications and skills development, and military production and development. The AI leader has expertise in systems engineering, strategic thinking, strategy development, team leadership, and project management.
Forrest and his team partner with Red Hat, Inc. to leverage AI capabilities to support the preservation of all warfighters on the battlefield. REd Hat’s Microshift technology allows unmanned aircraft to switch modalities during active operations. The AI program developed with Red Hat also gives soldiers easier plane control and enhances target detection accuracy, according to a recent account in ExecutiveBiz.
At Booz Allen Hamilton, John Larson, senior VP of the Strategic Innovation Group
John Larson is the current senior VP of Booz Allen Hamilton’s Strategic Innovation Group. He takes charge of the intelligence firm’s implementation of analytic solutions covering fraud, waste, artificial intelligence, deep learning services, and abuse detection and mitigation.
Booz Allen has more than 160 enterprise-wide deployments of AI in the federal government, according to a recent interview with Larson in ExecutiveBiz.
With his 20-year background in analytic solutions, Larson combines his experience with his current leadership role, leading a team of over 600 engineers, innovators, and technologists specializing in artificial intelligence efforts for defense, intelligence, and national security.
In May 2023, Booz Allen Hamilton partnered with Credo AI, an organization specializing in responsible and ethical AI practices. Larson emphasized that this collaboration enables the company to integrate Credo’s reliable AI technologies into their AIOps technology structures and ecosystems. This integration aims to help compliance, programmatic teams, and machine learning engineering capabilities reach ethical AI standards efficiently.
“The biggest trend emerging in the market today is certainly generative AI,” Larson stated in the recent interview, noting that his team has five years of experience working with large language models. “Prompt-driven engineering is emerging as a skillset because the better you are at engaging these engines and informing and setting the context of that prompt,, the better the results you will get,” he stated.
At the IBM Center for the Business of Government, Margaret Graves, senior fellow
Appointed to her current post in July 2021, Margaret Graves focuses on creating technical solutions to solve problems in federal markets. She has over three decades of experience in the technology sector, having worked closely to offer customized services to government agencies.
Prior to moving to IBM, Graves was the Federal Deputy Chief Information Officer for the Executive Office of the US President for nearly four years. She was responsible for delivering growth for digital services and developing next-generation IT workforces.
Her certifications include AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner from Amazon Web Services and IBM Garage Essentials from IBM. She is now a top AI executive and digital transformation strategist for the federal government. The IBM Center for the Business of Government works on improving federal, state and local governments through technology including AI.
At Carahsoft, Michael Adams, sales director
Carahsoft, a government IT solutions provider based in Reston, offers a portfolio of machine learning, cognitive technology and offerings from AI vendor partners, including analytics vendors Tableau and Cloudera. Since joining Carahsoft in September 2007 as an account manager, Adams has been instrumental in the company’s annual growth, which culminated in $6.095 billion in 2019 bookings, according to a GovCon Wire account.
Carahsoft is currently focusing on Nvidia’s Inception Program, which uses cloud-based GPU computing platforms to accelerate government digital transformation and AI workload. Carahsoft has helped Nvidia’s Inception partners by bringing computer vision, natural language processing and cybersecurity services to software suppliers.
In a recent interview in ExecutiveBiz, Adams described his responsibilities as managing an AI and big data solutions team, which collaborates with more than 50 solution partners serving the government sector. Carahsoft connected clients with implementation partners and resellers.
Asked about the impact of generative AI on government purchasing, Adams stated, “Excitement around generative AI is encouraging government agencies to more quickly embrace AI.” Also, “We’re seeing a boom of startups focused on AI and many vendors beginning to integrate large language models and natural language processing into their offerings.”
Many agencies need to upgrade their computing infrastructures to take advantage of the opportunity. “They need modern, high-performance data centers or cloud infrastructures to support future AI workloads,” Adams stated. That sounds good for business.
Read the source articles and information from Reuters, in Fedscoop, in ExecutiveGov, in GovCon Wire, in ExecutiveBiz and also in ExecutiveBiz.
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