AUSA: BigBear.ai's Ryan Legge

So we do everything from force management to readiness, to logistics. Really that really kind of talks about, you know, how to how does the army prepare troops? How do they get them ready for a mission? What battles are they going to take part in and things like that? How do we get them ready more quickly? Um, one of the ways we do that is with one of our Gen I platforms, which allows you to bring multiple AI models into one location to put it at the fingertips of both senior leaders and operators, right? And you can see how powerful that would be having all that in one place.

So what we really bring is a unique combination of one, domain expertise, which is really needed around the army, and two, cutting edge technology. So we've been, we consider the army one of our pillar partners for many, many years, as we've been doing this for 20 plus years around business around the army. Um, today we're focused on two main areas in the army. One, we do a lot of enterprise side work and two, we do a lot of tactical work.

So enterprise, what I'm talking about there is basically, how do we turn complex information into more informed decisions for our senior leaders? So how do they react quicker as times are changing, which is we've seen these days, times change very, very quickly. Um,

so we do everything from force management to readiness, to logistics. Really that really kind of talks about, you know, how to how does the army prepare troops? How do they get them ready for a mission? What battles are they going to take part in and things like that? How do we get them ready more quickly? Um, one of the ways we do that is with one of our Gen I platforms, which allows you to bring multiple AI models into one location to put it at the fingertips of both senior leaders and operators, right? And you can see how powerful that would be having all that in one place.

Over the course of the last 20 years, the conversation of artificial intelligence, man, I got to imagine from where you're positioned, it has changed a lot. What do you see as some being some of the biggest opportunities at the intersection of artificial intelligence with the military.

So I think there's a couple of different areas. One I think is how do you, how do you harness what that AI is and what it can do, right? I think it's been unleashed a little bit on what it can do. When we start talking about trustworthy AI and reliable AI, how do you take the AI and give it to the advantage to help the senior leaders and the war fighters make more informed decisions and how do you use it their advantage, right? So it's really, it's come on very quickly on what you can do, but you got to make sure that you're getting to the crux of how do you help the mission customer more of than just doing some of the tedious tasks that it can also do as well.

What are some of the biggest challenges, the potential headwinds as we like to call them down on Wall Street, about deployment of artificial intelligence on the battlefield?

So I think Dr. Alex Miller, who's the Army CTO has really been hitting on it over the last year and a half, I'd say, is really interoperability. Right? So you look at how do you have some of these vendors and technologies out there, and how do they work together in a more seamless operation? So we're really starting to do that heavily around autonomous systems. So if you look, I'll give you an illustrative example. If you had, um, some like an army recon force that's going to go out some drones, they're going to go out there and scope out for an army convoy coming in force.

Right now, the soldier might be that's operating that, he's operating an individual drone at a time. What he really needs the ability to do is to have the data, the AI, all seamlessly work to have these drones be commanded together. So that's what we're developing a little bit with a platform we have called Conductor OS, which is really helps, it orchestrates kind of the AI, the data and the models seamlessly to allow these drones to be commanded as one rather than individually before. But I think the interoperability of how these technologies work is really a crux of what the army needs to continue to do moving forward.

And finally, where do you still see some of the biggest opportunities in the road ahead for Big Bear AI, even over the course of really just the next few years, right?

I think it's going to be around, it's going to be around what Gen AI can do. I mean, you're looking at a lot of what what the AI platforms can do. You got a lot of different models out there. And I keep going back to a common theme, right? It's interoperability with that. And how do you allow the user, whether you're an operator, whether you're a senior leader, how do you utilize the best model available, right, to help you make those more informed decisions? Because as we know, the battlefield is becoming more and more complex, so we have to be able to to react a lot quicker and be a lot more agile on how we go. And that's a lot of what we're going to concentrate on the next five to six years.

Ryan Leg, Big Bear AI, thanks for chatting with me. JD,

I really appreciate it. Thanks for your time.