Nand Mulchandani, chief technology officer of the Department of Defense’s (DoD) Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC), said JAIC plans to fund AI projects by implementing a venture capital model that involves mission teams and product managers, Defense One reported Thursday.
He said the mission team will be composed of client representatives to identify the type of agency data that might prove useful in addressing a problem and the product manager will oversee the actual development of a product and “gather customer needs, make those into product features, work with the program manager, ask, ‘What does the product do? How is it priced?’” He said the product manager and the mission team will bring a small portion of agency data to software vendors who can help address the problem.
“We’re going to have a Series A, a seed amount of money. You [the vendor] get a half a million bucks to curate the data, which tends to be the problem. Do the problem x in a very tiny way, taking sample data, seeing if an algorithm applies to it, and then scale it,” Mulchandani said Wednesday during an Intelligence and National Security Alliance-hosted event.
