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The Daily Scoop Podcast
GSA’s central role in the Trump administration
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The General Services Administration has leaned in…
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- [00:00]
A
Today on the Daily Scoop podcast from the Scoop News Group, GSA's central role in the Trump administration. Fed Scoop reporter Miranda Nazaro, who reports on the GSA, takes you inside. It's Tuesday, January 27, 2026. Welcome to the Daily Scoop podcast where you'll hear the latest news and trends facing government leaders. I'm the host of the Daily Scoop Podcast, Billy Mitchell. Thanks so much for joining me. Now let's dive into the day's top headlines. The Treasury Department said Monday that it would cancel all of its contracts with Booz Allen Hamilton, linking the decision to a former employee now serving prison time for leaking tax returns. Treasury Secretary Scott Besant said in a three paragraph press release that the agency's 31 contracts with Booz Allen, worth $21 million in total obligations and $4.8 million in annual spending, would be scrapped as part of President Donald Trump's push to root out waste, fraud and abuse. Besant said canceling these contracts is an essential step to increasing Americans trust in government. Booz Allen failed to implement adequate safeguards to protect sensitive data, including the confidential taxpayer information it had access to through its contracts with the Internal Revenue Service. A Booze spokesperson said in an email to FedScoop that the firm was surprised by this announcement and especially given Treasury's reasoning regarding Charles Edward LittleJohn, who between 2018 and 2020 leaked the confidential tax returns and information of hundreds of thousands of taxpayers. That spokesperson went on to say that, quote, booz Allen fully supported the US Government in its investigation and the government expressed gratitude for our assistance which led to Little John's prosecution. We were surprised by this announcement and look forward to discussing this matter with treasury, unquote. Per the treasury release, the IRS determined that the data breach affected roughly 406,000 taxpayers. Little John, who was sentenced to five years in prison last January after pleading guilty to one count of disclosing tax return information without authorization, leaked the returns of Trump, Elon Musk and other wealthy individuals to a pair of news organizations. Now moving on to other news. Now NASA has a new top official for artificial intelligence and data. Kevin Murphy began serving in an acting capacity in both roles November 30, 2025. NASA spokesperson Jennifer Duran confirmed a Fed scoop in an email. He replaces David Salvagnini, who was the agency's CDO for roughly two and a half years, and CAIO for just over a year and a half. Salvagnini was the agency's first ever CAIO, according to Murphy's LinkedIn. He has been at NASA for over 17 years. He first served as a system architect at NASA's Goddard Space Flight center and has held a series of data related roles, including Chief Science Data Officer. As the agency's lead for data science, Murphy has already worked to advance technology such as cloud computing, machine learning and data platforms for use with NASA's scientific data per agency bio. He also oversees the agency's High End Computing Capability, or HECC portfolio, which is which deploys computing technologies to support large scale modeling, simulation and analysis at the agency. Murphy's designation as acting CAIO and CDO come after Salvagnini announced his plans to leave the agency in a LinkedIn post roughly two months ago. In that post, Salvagnini said he opted into the Trump administration's deferred resignation program and said he began his transition Oct. 31 and would retire from federal service in the spring of 2026. For more news at the intersection of the federal government and technology, make sure to visit fedscoop.com the General Services Administration has leaned into its role as a central shared services provider for the rest of the federal government during the second Trump administration. In particular, it has taken a leadership position, centralizing most federal procurement under one roof and serving as a sort of clearinghouse for federal AI efforts, among others. With so much transformation underway, the GSA during Trump 2.0 has taken on an even brighter spotlight, fueling federal operations. Miranda Nazaro is the Fed Scoop reporter covering GSA during this pivotal time, and she's joining me now to discuss some of the agency's top priorities, from one Gov and the TMF to eliminating woke AI. Let's now go to that conversation with Fed Scoop reporter Miranda Nazaro. Miranda, good to see you. Welcome to the podcast. It's your first time, I believe. I don't think we've done this before.
- [04:38]
B
I don't think so. Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited.
- [04:41]
A
Well, you've, you've been on board with us, you're coming on close. You know, in a couple months it'll be your first year with us with FedScoop, and you've been covering GSA pretty religiously since coming on board and doing a tremendous job at it, and I want to kind of spend some time with you diving into that today because as we've kind of come to the one year mark of the Trump 2.0 administration, we've really seen GSA sort of emerge as this leader in providing sort of central shared services, whether it be procurement or AI or different things And I know you've been closely watching a lot of those different things. And one of the key things that the Trump administration has pushed is this notion of one Gov in the way that the federal government buys common services. And quite frequently that's technology services under one glengv. So let's start there. I know you've been doing a lot of reporting on that program, quite frequently writing about the announcements when new software providers or technology companies reach agreements under that. So a year into that sort of program or initiative, how are things going for that, under your purview?
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B
Yeah, absolutely. So I think that, as you mentioned, GSA really sits at the heart of a lot of the biggest technology initiatives in the federal government. So the Trump administration, back in the beginning for the second term, basically tasked GSA specifically with streamlining procurement, really consolidating most technology procurement to that agency. So they've done this through the one Gov contracting vehicle, which basically aims to work directly with the original equipment manufacturers or just technology vendors instead of resellers. Now, that has been the vision in terms of how that's played out. It like any new program, there have definitely been some learning curves, as several folks at GSA have said. So a lot of the deals that we saw rolled out at first were with companies that already worked with the government. You have Microsoft, SAP companies like Google, where they already have. They're already familiar in the government contracting space. So it was a lot easier to work directly with the OEMs. In that case. However, you have some new players like OpenAI Anthropic, mostly the AI companies in general who are are newer to this space. And as a result, you still have the reseller in the process. So I think 2025 for one gov was about sort of laying this foundation. A lot of folks in December said that the next iteration of this is trying to work with more OEMs directly instead of through resellers. But unfortunately, just given how long the process takes for companies to whether it's get FedRAMP approved or even just ATOs. So I think that's what they're looking for in 2026. You'll also notice that a lot of the deals that happened in the first place were with AI companies for very small dollar amounts that agencies could get their technology. And now you're starting to see it not be as much about AI companies. You're seeing some cybersecurity companies. So it seems like they're also sort of shifting their focus a bit in terms of the companies they're looking to work with also. I'm not saying that doesn't mean AI companies aren't welcome. I think just they've hit, they hit a lot of the major players within three to four weeks. So I think we're going to start to see some different types of vendors. Like even Uber has a one gun deal. So I think that's something to be on the lookout for.
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A
Yeah, I think you're spot on. I think, you know, there's been this rush to get AI into government and that's why you saw that happen in that way. And now you'll see some more of the commodity it that, you know, the services that federal workers use every day that maybe they don't think a lot about how the federal government buys it, but it seems like the strategy is looking to approach it where, you know, agency A and Agency B have the same terms and agreement so that the federal government's getting the, the best value for its large purchasing power. You mentioned the reseller aspect. And I know up front when I was doing some watching of this one Gov initiative that the reseller part was one thing that they wanted to get out of the way of. They saw it as a wasteful middleman, so to speak, or that it was just adding to the overall overhead costs. So tell me where things stand now. You mentioned that there was maybe a sort of looming shift in that direction or some sorting out that GSA and the Trump administration want to do. I know that you recently wrote about a new RFI that GSA put out. Tell us about that.
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B
Yeah, so I think an interesting caveat to all of this is that they, they have framed one Gov as wanting to sort of eliminate that middleman reseller. But in recent weeks and even some recent months, a lot of GSA leaders, I noticed this at an event I was at last month, really emphasize that they still want resellers to play some sort of role. There was the whole idea of flipping the role of the reseller and the oem, but that's not necessarily what's happened, just given some of the other complications that come with working with the government. So this RFI that was put out last week was basically asking industry, including the resellers themselves, how can we improve cost reductions when it comes to value added resellers. So the, these are resellers that are also kind of customizing a product when it comes to them before reselling it to the government. So this is just kind of getting more at the cost reduction component, streamlining it. And they're also, I think you can kind of read between the lines and the RFI and see that GSA is looking at ways to, you know, how do we get the most bang for our buck, whether it's from a reseller or an oem. So, you know, I think as you mentioned, there have still been a lot of deals with resellers and I think there will continue to be, but I think they're trying to make sure that if we are still going to be working with resellers, we're getting the most we can out of it. And a lot of, a lot of that RFI is looking at duplicative costs, markup costs, like how much is the reseller increasing the cost of the product versus, you know, what they bought it for from a vendor like OpenAI or something like that.
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A
Will certainly be interesting to watch how that sort of unfolds. We talked a little bit at the top of our conversation about how important AI has been and GSA has really been sort of promoting that, not only through the procurement aspect that we just discussed, but also, you know, as a service provider. It has sort of served as, for lack of a better term, a clearinghouse that brings together these AI tools, presents them to the federal government and sort of lets agencies test them out short of having to go out and acquire them on their own. So earlier, or I guess last year, now it wasn't earlier, this year was last year, the middle of last year, Fed Scoop reported on GSAI and USAI and that being sort of that, that figurative head of that initiative. But there's also been some interesting developments lately around GSA providing AI and sort of also vetting whether some of that AI meshes well with the Trump administration's priorities like eliminating wokeness and how some of those AI models might contain some of those biases. So what is GSA's role in as it relates to that and where things today as that develops?
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B
Right. So I think with the rollout of USAI that we saw in August, which is basically this evaluation tool that agencies could use to test out different AI products before deciding to procure it from the GSA schedule and or a one Gov deal, you know, their role there is they really just want to be the provider of the tools. A lot of questions have come up when it comes to different AI models, their hallucinations, their output. GROK from XAI has obviously been a big topic of that conversation. And grok, you know, isn't on USAI yet does have a one Gov deal. But that, that's a, that's a Good example of one where they are kind of being forced to answer these questions and when you ask them, they say GROK is still undergoing safety testing. And then the other flip side of that is, as you mentioned, there's this really big push right now in the administration against so called Woke AI. When this executive order first came out in July, there was a lot of confusion as to what that actually means. I think there still is some confusion. OMB did release some guidance on it last month, but it actually wasn't directly calling out gsa, which I found kind of interesting given how big of a role GSA plays in getting AI into agencies. It more so talked about the decisions that individual agencies should make. So I think GSA is kind of in this gray zone of the, they're helping provide the tools, but they're also not necessarily making decisions as to what DOT or FAA might choose when actually picking a model. But I think it's, I think it really does remain to be seen because I, you know, at first a lot of people said this Woke AI order is, is this a messaging tactic? How do you even really test this? And I think it's going to take a while before we can see how either GSA or other agencies try to comply with this kind of vague order.
- [13:33]
A
Yeah, it'll certainly be interesting to see, you know, what end stance the administration takes and then how AI companies sort of tailor their models to make sure that it plays nicely if it does get to that level of scrutiny. You know, the last thing GSA has done so much, one area we haven't touched on that has been in the news a lot recently is the Technology Modernization Fund, which is really a government wide fund, but it's housed in GSA and the struggles that that fund has had both in terms of getting reauthorized as that authorization expired at the end of last year, and the funding element, which has been a perennial issue. So where do things stand today in terms of TF in its authorization cycle and also having the appropriate funding to, to do the modernization that it set out to do?
- [14:19]
B
Yeah, so the TMF is currently on pause. It was not reauthorized in early December, which a lot of what surprised a lot of people. Given it's a pretty bipartisan measure, it's usually just a procedural matter of one or two senators may be holding it up. And once it didn't get reauthorized and as you know, Congress is constantly dealing with these spending packages and these battles and the inability to pass them on time. We saw just Last week, reauthorization for the TMF at least through the end of fiscal year 2026. So that's the end of this coming September for it to be reauthorized is included in that spending package. Now, that spending package needs to be passed before or by the end of January 30th, or else we're heading for another partial government shutdown. But unfortunately it's passed in the House, but now it's facing issues in the Senate because of the Department of Homeland Security component and the ongoing debates over immigration enforcement. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said that they are going to try to push through the other bills besides dhs, which in this case TMF would be safe if they do that. You know, there isn't much controversial about tmf, and so it should be safe if that plan sticks. However, given Congress, they're a little unpredictable when it comes to spending. So, you know, I think they're very close in the clear, but it really depends on how they the next few days play out.
- [15:44]
A
Yeah. I was going to ask from your reporting, have you heard any. I mean, I would imagine TMF is almost unanimously a positive, bipartisan, supported thing. Has there been anything that's in particular that's hung it up, or is it just politics at play?
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B
It's, it's, I think, a combination of things. It's its procedural hurdles. So it needed to be reauthorized shortly after the government reopened from the longest shutdown. So that just kind of pushed a lot of what should have been routine bills and authorizations kind of to the wayside. And then unfortunately, with the Senate, only one or two lawmakers can hold things up. So sources had told me last month that Senator Rand Paul was a big part of this and he is chair of the committee that needs any sort of reauthorization to move forward. So that's why they often opt to throw these into spending packages where you're not going to have a lawmaker hold up the whole entire package just because of this one component. In 2017, when it was authorized, that's also. It went into an ndaa. This isn't, this isn't atypical. It's often you try to stick as much as you can in spending packages because normal, everyday congressional hurdles are. Are hard to deal with.
- [16:55]
A
Sure. Well, we'll keep close watch and see if it does earn that reauthorization amid all the craziness of the spending bills and what's going on at dhs. Final thought, anything else you're keeping an eye on Miranda?
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B
Yeah, I think just as you know, we just hit the year mark with the Trump administration in its second term and a large part of the first half of that year and still kind of lingering is the status of the federal workforce. And why that really plays a role with GSA is you saw like every agency, you saw some of its workforce sort of either be laid off or voluntary or sorry, involuntary resignations. And you, as a result there's, you know, a loss of expertise when it comes to government contracting. So something I've heard a lot at an event from GSA folks was we have this one gov structure in place, for example, but we don't have enough contracting officers who are caught up on how to do this. So I think, you know, you can have a program in place, but you know, the lack of workforce or the loss of workforce is something to keep an eye on to see if GSA and other agencies, of course, but in terms of contracting and procurement, if they do beef up those teams again, because I kind of got the sense when I was at an event with a lot of GSA people last month that there is the, the puzzle pieces are there, but you need somebody to put them together. So just something to keep an eye on. You know, it'd probably be a while before we get actual work for numbers for this coming year, but definitely something to keep in mind whenever talking about this.
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A
I agree. I think that's going to be such an essential point of every story we're telling this year is are they going to bring some of that workforce back to support these existing missions that can't be done without the talented, skilled employees. Miranda, fantastic conversation. Thanks for keeping us abreast of everything going on at GSA and of course everything else you do. Thank you so much.
- [18:44]
B
Thanks so much.
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A
For more on the transformation underway@the GSA, make sure to visit fedscoop.com Also in this episode, Alan Day, a retired U.S. army major general and now the Salesforce Vice President for Logistics and Sustainment Industry strategy, joins SNG host Wyatt Cash in a sponsored podcast discussion on how agentic AI is enabling the Pentagon to move faster than emerging threats.
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B
Foreign.
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C
Welcome to our special series on agentic AI for government brought to you by Salesforce. Artificial intelligence is reshaping some of the Pentagon's most complex and fast moving mission challenges. From accelerating logistics and strengthening supply chain resilience to enhancing strategic decision making and identifying vulnerabilities before they become a crisis, AI throughout is becoming rapidly becoming a foundational capability for national defense, I'm Wyatt Cash with scoop newsgroup. And joining us to explore where this technology is making the most significant impact today and what mission needs its best position to address, and how it can help defense leaders move from reactive operations to proactive readiness, is retired Major General Alan Day, Vice president for logistics and sustainment industry strategy for Salesforce's global public sector business. General Day previously served as director of Operations for the Defense Logistics Agency. General Day, thank you so much for joining us and welcome to the program.
- [20:21]
D
It's great to be here. Thank you.
- [20:22]
C
Wyatt, in our last episode in this series, we talked about Salesforce's deepening investment and its support of the defense and national security sector, including its rollout of Mission Force. From your perspective and from your days at the Defense Logistics Agency, how would you describe the significance of Mission Force?
- [20:44]
D
Well, thank you for the question, Wyatt. When I served as a J3 at the defense Logistics Agency, I was responsible for a $41 billion enterprise supporting 2300 weapons systems globally with about 89,000 orders coming in a day. So we had to solve a lot of different kinds of problems every day to really ensure the mission execution for the warfighter. And that warfighter was often in remote environments where there was few logistics lines of communication. So what I learned there is you cannot manage that level of complexity with stovepiped industrial aid systems. And so how does that affect us when we think about Mission Force? So that was my past. Now as I think about Mission Force, you know, it's a new initiative, really came about as a direct response to a question and a request from a senior military officer who told us that he wanted to bring the same speed and efficiency he saw in the private sector. And so this dedicated business unit was stood up, and it's focusing Salesforce's proven platform and into the defense, intelligence, and aerospace communities like you mentioned. So at dla, we often struggle to adapt commercial best practices to government constraints. Mission Force helps us solve all of that in a lot of different ways. It allows us to optimize mission readiness, logistics, personnel, and decision making kind of problem sets by tailoring the commercial innovation specifically for the warfighter. That is the mission of Mission Force. And it represents, like you said, a deepening of our investment and commitment into the defense and national security sectors. So I think bringing the best of what we do in commercial to the Department of War and the public sector in general is really how we're going to get after using AI in a better way in the Department of War. We need to bring our best there. We can't just give them the things that might work or could work. The defense of this nation and national security demands our best. And that's something that I'm excited for. And I think it's exactly what we're trying to provide through mission force to deliver an agentic enterprise at the speed that we demand for our mission in the Department of War.
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C
And just diving a little deeper, how do you see the evolution of AI impacting the rapidly changing challenges, as it were, faced by the War Department?
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D
We are moving from the information age, where we built dashboards to admire the problem, to the agentic age. The strategic environment has fundamentally shifted. We're moving toward a Department of War posture where the greatest challenge is really achieving decision advantage or decision dominance. People put it different ways, but that's the ability to understand, decide and act faster than our adversaries. And the challenges today are too fast for manual processing. But agentic AI doesn't just summarize the facts. It actually takes action. That's the difference. It allows us to move from reacting to crises to orchestrating outcomes. In the past, we would have problems that we would try to find the right data to answer the questions. Sometimes there were my questions that I would ask people and they would try to find the right answers. And sometimes that took weeks. It's crazy to think about, but it took weeks to stitch together the data and the information that came out of that data to get back to the decision maker, sometimes me, in a timely way. With the gentic AI, we can literally fuse live streams of data. Right. And get clarity in seconds. And to me, this is really powerful when you think about supply chain challenges that we deal with. Right. So you can identify vulnerabilities before they become crises. That's the key. We can't do that at the speed that we need to with a human staff. A human staff empowered by agentic AI can do that. Right. Agentic AI also gives you kind of a limitless digital workforce. So you're, you're not paying for extra humans, but you are getting the benefit of lots of different perspectives from a digital workforce. And they can take care of that stuff that nobody wants to do. The routine, routine drudgery, right. That the things that the humans don't want to do. And we can allow the humans to have the time to focus on the more complex and high stakes kind of decisions that they need to make every day. So I think agentic AI is really bringing decision advantage or dominance from a concept into an actual capability.
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C
So you mentioned the opportunities with data. Can you talk about what fundamental needs that you see AI addressing when it comes to data and data management?
- [25:51]
D
There's several, but I would like to highlight three fundamental needs for AI to address. Readiness, resilience, and trust. The first is readiness. Right now, our service members spend way too much time acting as the human glue, stitching together data from disconnected legacy systems. And the most fundamental need is really freeing up their mental capacity. We need our people focused on the mission, not on form filling or inventory counting. And we also need a layer that sits above those legacy systems and connects them to form, like this intuitive human interface. Because today, when you bring a new airman in, they have to learn the old legacy system. They put their iPhone 15, 16, 17 down, and they bring up the green screen and they start learning a system that was developed in the 80s and 90s, which sounds crazy, but it's actually true. So we need to get them back to the mission. By having this engagement layer approach, we can actually pull the data from all of the systems they may need to see from finance, supply and operations or whatever that those systems might be, and they're able to get a full picture, not just a stovepipe picture, that is allowing them to maximize their availability because they're now focused on them versus on all of the minutiae of doing their job and stitching together to the data. The second area is resilience. You know, we operate in a contested logistics environment everywhere, really. Once you leave the fence line of the base and you go off to do the mission at some faraway land or even in some different part of the United States, the supply chains that you rely on are contested. And it could be a digital supply chain, it could be a physical supply chain, it could be a supply chain of a different sort of. But the bottom line is they are contested. What does that mean? They can be disrupted by either a weather event, they could be disrupted by an adversary trying to disrupt them. There's a lot of different ways that contested logistics comes into play. Resilience has to be built in right from the beginning. And we need to be able to use AI to help us build that resilience and also to execute with resilience. And the final area is trust. If the warfighter doesn't trust the data or the algorithm that they're given to use, they won't use it. They simply will set it aside and do it the old way, because that's what they end up trusting. And I think if we have clean, governed data that doesn't hallucinate that actually ensures mission success. The war fighter is going to use it. Right. So readiness, from my perspective, is the what. Resilience is the how, but trust is the why. Because if the warfighter doesn't trust the algorithm, the mission fails before it even starts.
- [28:47]
C
Those are some great points. Thank you for that. I'd like to have you kind of translate that now into, so how does that impact logistics and supply chain issues, particularly for the military? And how do you see AI technology enabling this key mission area?
- [29:05]
D
You know, it's interesting, I think back my last two years in the military were during the pandemic. So I was a J3 for DLA during the pandemic. And if nothing else, the pandemic taught us that we cannot take supply chains for granted. We have to trust them to deliver. But sometimes they don't. Right. And it's not always the fault of the planner. Right. Things can go wrong, you never would expect. Additionally, as a chemist and a materials research engineer, it's really gratifying to see, you know, like lithium and nickel and cobalt and manganese, all of these elements that I studied on the periodic table for my, my schooling and in my actual life as a, as a research chemist in the headlines. Right. It was kind of cool. It's kind of cool to see that. But that's a direct result again of the pandemic where we didn't care where things came from. Now we care where things come from. And we should care where things come from because guess what? The precursors and the antecedents of the things that we need are sometimes in the hands of somebody that we're not friends with. Right. So we got to figure that thing out. And we've got to understand not only where things come from, but what is the, what are the best ways to bring it into our domain. Right. Either those of you specifically of the United States, or of a partner or friendly nation. How do we bring that all together? That's a key component of the supply chain problem. The other piece is something I call the physics of logistics. The three immutable constraints. I would say there's probably more, but I talk about three immutable constraints. Time, space, and cost. And the physics of logistics talks about how you have to make trades in time to get space and cost and vice versa. You've got to be able to work this physics problem, and I would say you can't cheat that kind of physics. But AI allows us to balance and manage the trade offs much more effectively. And agentic AI trades information for Inventory. So in a lot of ways, it's like if we don't have enough information, we'll pile more stuff to make sure we got enough. Right. But if we have more information, we. We can stop doing the just in case kind of inventory to a more predictive precision inventory. That's where we need to get to. Because we can't afford the logistics of mass. We need to move to a logistics of precision. That is where AI comes. So I would say in summary, you cannot cheat the physics of logistics in terms of time, space and cost. But with AI, you can finally master the equation to put the right part at the right place before the need even arises.
- [31:48]
C
That's a great way to frame that discussion. Appreciate that shifting gears a little from your perspective, how can AI and agentic AI also help organizations identify vulnerabilities maybe more effectively and then avoid the challenges of those vulnerabilities and really shift instead from reacting to them to being more proactive towards them?
- [32:13]
D
Another great question. You know, for me, it comes down to visibility, resilience and autonomous action. So one of our biggest vulnerabilities lies in our lack of visibility of our supply chain, right. And the lack of resiliency in our defense industrial base. So those two go hand in hand. We can't see, so we can't manage what we can't see. And our defense industrial base is really shrinking. There's less people that want to do business with the government for whatever reason. Some are trying to get in, but a lot of them have kind of lost faith or maybe they've just gone out of business because so and so and son so and so got old and decided that they didn't want to have the business anymore. And son decided that they didn't want to do it either. And so, you know, but there's also adversary actions that are actively targeting our networks. Right? So all of these things come together and we've got to decide if we can actually gain the visibility between our defense industrial base and our suppliers and dig deep. Is that something we want to do? I think the answer is yes. Because if you think about it, if you have the top level, level one kind of suppliers that are, you know, your primes, defense primes, you work your way down to level two, level three, and level four and deeper. That level four supplier might provide a key part, but you never see the level four. I mean, you don't pay attention to them because you're paying attention to the one or two or three due to privity of contract issues. And so if that level four goes out of business, they might provide critical parts to the levels above them and it can have huge unexpected effects on the rest of the supply chain. So how do we fix this? How do we get beyond it? This is where I think integrating data right from the right kinds of sources allows us to kind of get X ray vision. And I think I can help us do that. We got to connect the data sources and we can get like a partner.360. Right. A DIB Defense Industrial based partner.360 so not only can we see who's in the market, who's doing some of the things that we need to do. Right. They may not be in the defense market, but they might be in a commercial market. But they do the same kinds of things that we need them to do. If we have a broader view like that, we can incentivize to bring them in. But then we can also look down deep into the supply chains using AI tools to see things that a human may not see. Foreign influence, cyber risks, deep in the sub tiers. Right. Where adversaries are sometimes lurking and disrupting our supply chains before we know that they're doing it. So this is the key. When you ask a human to see something, it's very difficult sometimes for them to spot a 2% deviation in the supply chain flow. A human's going to maybe miss that. But AI can see pattern recognition very well. So where a human is going to have to recover the problem after they react to it and AI is going to see it coming potentially and flag those things, potential vulnerabilities for the human to take a look at. This is the power of agentic AI. And I think I know when I was in the DLA and other. It doesn't matter. Every organization I've been in to include the one I'm in now. You know, we have dashboards and we always look for the red and try to fix the red. And we're kind of reacting to the dashboard at some times. Right. I think AI agents actually can prevent the red from ever happening. And that's a superpower that I think we need to put in the hands of our Department of War to be able to see the patterns, see the minor deviations that could become bigger over time and deliver better effects so they can get ahead of the problems and not react to them. Thanks.
- [36:07]
C
And then lastly, looking towards the horizon, what do you see changing in the AI landscape from your new perspective and how do you see that likely to impact the defense sector?
- [36:22]
D
I think the future horizon Is defined by two primary things. The trusted action, taking trusted action and getting closer to the tactical edge. Our warfighters are on the tactical edge. That's where they operate. Not every day, but we have people on the tactical edge every day. Our AI tools need to be able to operate there as well as every single day. In normal operations, we need to be able to do both. And trust is the foundation for both of it. Right. So if we need to get beyond chatbots, we need to get beyond simple LLM kind of actions, which are helpful, but they're not war fighting capabilities. We need to be able to get clean, connected, trusted data. Right. And bring it together in such a way that we can trust its answers and start to take action faster than our adversaries. That is trusted action. We also need to be able to operate closer to tactical edge and that is an area we call ddil. Disconnected, degraded, intermittent and low bandwidth environments. DDIL is hard. That is hard because if it's disconnected, cloud systems don't necessarily work in that operation. But we have solutions that can operate in the detail environments and then as they get reconnected, they can synchronize the data. And I think the company that brings this together, the solution that comes together, is where we need to be right now, because that's where we're going to help the department of work the most. Right. The future belongs to those who can treat context as well. Like, can we have the right context around our data, that one know that it's trusted and also that it is something we can rely on even at the edge. Are we able to push it that far? So I think the future isn't really AI replacing a war fighter, but it's enabling a warfighter. It's empowering the warfighter. It's making the warfighter better because they're using the tools that make them smarter, faster, and more capable of making the right decision in a time of relevance.
- [38:36]
C
Well, General Allen Day, thank you very much for joining us today and in particular sharing your insights from your perspective in the military, how AI may likely impact the world of logistics and supply chains and the defense sector at large. So thank you so much for being with us. Appreciate it.
- [38:55]
B
You bet.
- [38:55]
A
This segment was sponsored by Salesforce. For more news at the intersection of the federal government and technology, make sure to visit fedscoop.com thanks so much for tuning in to another episode of the Daily Scoop podcast, available on all podcast platforms. If you've already rated the podcast on your platform of choice, thanks so much. High ratings and good reviews of the show help more people to find it. The Daily Scoop Podcast is a production of the Scoop News Group in Washington, D.C. adam Butler and Carlin Fisher help put the show together, and the entire Scoop News Group team contributes. We'll be back tomorrow with more top headlines. Until then, I'm your host. As always, Billy Mitchell. Thanks so much for listening.