Booz Allen Hamilton has won an $885 million task order to provide artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning support to the U.S. Government Program Office, for use by the Defense Department (DoD), the company announced Monday.
The General Services Administration’s Federal Systems Integration and Management Center awarded a potential five-year contract, which will see Booz Allen deliver an open systems architecture that incorporates Enterprise Machine Learning Analytics and Persistent Services–what the firm is calling an eMAPS solution.
“Our team of expert data scientists and engineers will apply cutting-edge solutions to deliver integrated eMAPS support to unlock the value of artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics, which will give warfighters positioned around the world the tools they need to drive U.S. national security forward,” Judi Dotson, executive vice president, Booz Allen, said in a press release.
The solution “will enable the USG Program Office, Defense Department partners and the intelligence community to rapidly employ artificial intelligence, neural and deep neural networks” and “will focus on integrating machine learning capabilities with a full spectrum of Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) systems that support military operations,” the company said.
Booz Allen CEO Horacio Rozanski discussed the new contract during the company’s first quarter FY2019 earnings call Monday. Rozanski said that “coming out of DoD, it’s clear that artificial intelligence is an area of focus and an area of investment.”
“This concept of artificial intelligence, algorithmic warfare, is going to be a part of the equation for DoD for quite some time, and we’re very excited to be a part of it,” he added.
The new contract to develop an open systems architecture comes as DoD begins work standing up its Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, which was established June 27. The Pentagon also released the final draft request for proposals for its $10 billion enterprise cloud contract on July 26. DoD CIO Dana Deasy said that cloud “is the foundation” for artificial intelligence at the Department, and said both are among his “key strategic areas” to support the National Defense Strategy.
