Deloitte Wins $106M JAIC Contract To Build AI Toolkit

WASHINGTON: Inventing artificial intelligence algorithms shouldn’t require reinventing the wheel but in the fractured, bureaucratic world of the Defense Department it all too often does. That’s why the Pentagon’s Joint AI Center has hired Deloitte Consulting to build the Joint Common Foundation, a cloud-based AI development kit for any DoD organization to use.

Awarded yesterday but announced this afternoon, the contract names Deloitte as the one and only “prime integrator” for “Systems Engineering, Technology, and Innovation.” (There were three other bidders, not disclosed). That makes the company responsible for pulling together all the technologies and subcontractors required to build the Joint Common Foundation and keeping it updated, secure and operational.

The minimum scope of the contract is $31 million over one year (starting Aug. 17), but if the Pentagon is pleased with Deloitte’s performance, it can exercise annual options that could grow the contract to a maximum of $106.4 million over four years (through 2024).

So what is the Joint Common Foundation supposed to be the foundation of, in layman’s terms? It’s a common and reproducible approach to AI across the Department of Defense, instead of the current uncoordinated blooming of a hundred flowers.

“What I want to build, the Joint Common Foundation, is an incentive for people to come into the JAIC and get away from all of the bespoke solutions that they’ve had to stand up across the department, mostly in research labs cause they had no other choice,” Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan, founding director of the JAIC, told a media roundtable a year ago. “[I want] somebody on a battlefield in Afghanistan to get the access to the Joint Common Foundation, [so they] can build their own app and just do it in real time.”

Lots of different entities across DoD have done innovative work with artificial intelligence, but they were rarely able to build on one another’s work. Projects had to cover the same ground over and over, in different and not necessarily compatible ways. And doing AI this way took too much effort for smaller organizations to do at all.

So the JAIC set out to create a common set of AI development tools, shared training data for machine-learning algorithms, and a common environment to use them in, specifically set up to facilitate the Silicon Valley best-practice methodology known as DevSecOps. So this “common foundation” for AI could be accessed by anyone in the Defense Department – from major programs to that hypothetical operator in Afghanistan – they decided to put it in the cloud.

The Joint Common Foundation was delayed, Shanahan acknowledged, by the Pentagon’s problems setting up the controversial cloud computing system known as JEDI (Joint Enterprise Defense Initiative), which was supposed to be the default option for cloud projects across the DoD. When Shanahan gave this explanation to reporters last August, JAIC was just putting together what he called “Version 0.5” of the Joint Common Foundation as a “minimum viable product.” Since then, however, JAIC has gone ahead without JEDI and started using other clouds for its projects, such as the Air Force’s CloudOne.