CDAO Enabling Workforce to Harness Data Analytics, AI

Nearly a year after the Pentagon released its AI adoption strategy, the agency’s Chief Digital and AI Office (CDAO) is making strides in aligning strategic objectives with empowering the workforce to leverage data analytics and AI.

The Department of Defense (DoD) unveiled the  2023 Data, Analytics, and Artificial Intelligence Adoption Strategy, on Nov. 2, 2023 which aimed to create a “foundation at the DoD for the accelerated adoption and usage of data, analytics, and AI across the department while promoting speed, delivery, learning, and responsible development.”

“We’re cultivating a digital workforce that knows how and when to use data analytics and AI in their day-to-day business and for warfighter functions,” Christopher Skaluba, executive director at the DoD CDAO, said during an FNN webinar on Sept. 26.

Skaluba noted that the CDAO is actively working on multiple initiatives to drive the three priorities of the AI adoption strategy – enable, speed, and scale – and equip the DoD workforce to effectively utilize data analytics and AI in their daily operations.

One of the key initiatives he highlighted is the development of a standardized framework designed to identify both current and future staff with critical data analytics and AI skill sets and align them with the appropriate training opportunities tailored to their specific roles and mission requirements.

“We have a digital learning framework that enables staff to build data analytics and AI knowledge at foundational, intermediate, and advanced levels for their specific roles in the department,” Skaluba said. “We’re [also] conducting extensive outreach in local communities through academic and industry partnerships, broadening students’ exposure to DoD career paths in data analytics and AI, starting from middle school and high school to college.”

However, Skaluba emphasized that while the focus is on empowering the workforce to leverage data analytics and AI, it’s equally important to foster a culture of learning and experimentation across the department. He highlighted that this responsibility falls on the entire department, not just CDAO.

“We want the staff to experiment with use cases in responsible ways, and we want leaders who will be willing to change how they think about their organization’s data, how it’s structured, how they share it. A significant piece of this is just changing the culture. And that’s not something CDAO can do. We can only set the foundation of that for the rest of the department to follow and get folks [to] change the culture,” Skaluba said.