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A3 Technology | Fortune

A3 Technology Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings | Fortune

Chief financial officers are taking on roles that go well beyond traditional financial oversight. Today’s CFOs not only manage financial performance but also lead strategic initiatives, including technology investments during times of uncertainty. In this panel session, Fortune 500 CFOs will share how they are navigating these expanding responsibilities and positioning their companies for long-term growth.

Meet The Modern CFO

Conferences

So the CFO role is evolving. That's what we hear. What does it mean to be a modern CFO? I'll start with you. Goodness, great question. Oh, that's really loud. OK, well, you're absolutely right. I think the role of the CFO has been evolving over time. We were talking backstage and I am in role at ServiceNow almost 6 years and then I was CFO before that at my last place for about 3, so almost 10 years in the CFO role, and it's definitely been evolving. I would say much more so today than ever before. It's a combination of strategic vision. Solid and disciplined execution every single day along with enterprise-wide leadership. I tell my teams every day that we have to perform and transform at the same time and finance and strategy now is inseparable. And so I was recently promoted also to president and CFO and I have I have global strategy and corp de under my remit as well. And so as financial oversight and strategic vision and direction come together, it's all housed in one place under my remit right now, which is really. Exciting because as you think about capital allocation, one of the biggest jobs of a CFO, you've got to be fueling growth and really creating conditions for growth for the future. And so I'm sure we'll be talking about AI and investments in AI at some point today. But to be the steward of the of the checkbook and making sure that we are allocating resources to the growth areas is more important. So having that combination of strategy along with the execution and financial stewardship has been super fun. I say I'm in my my dream job because it keeps evolving every single day. Gina, I couldn't agree more, and I think realistically and as we were speaking backstage, the closing of the books, the financial reporting, that's kind of an autopilot, right? And if you have good teams and they're doing that day to day. And what that allows us to do is really partner with the CEO with the leadership team to really run the company, and I was actually telling Gino's story backstage. Um, I'm, I've been in the role for 1 year and a half and prior to this I spent 7 years running businesses, running P&Ls at Prudential, and when this opportunity came up, I was really worried that I was leaving behind running a business. What I didn't realize, but I quickly realized when I took on the role is that now I get to partner in running the entire company, and that's what makes the job so fantastic. I think the partnering piece is a huge aspect and talk about whether you talked about growth and I think about my role as being kind of the the internal growth partner to the entire executive team to really help them. Unleash the the capabilities they have within their team to really push to higher goals and also to help them understand what are the appropriate guard rails that we should have so that we can move as quickly as possible while achieving those goals. Yeah, now I just also add that. The role of the CFO has a really unique vantage point that we we are probably alone with the CEO and the ability to see across the entirety of the enterprise, so that ability to connect dots in what's working, what's not working, how to funnel investment in the right place, how to pause it when maybe it's not working as well, I think it gives us a unique perspective that I think is being valued more and more today. So you are basically sitting at the center of strategy at your that's right. And speaking of strategy, we're in times of uncertainty, um, how do you approach leading strategic initiatives like technology investments or M&A during uncertain times? Oh, you want to start, um, when I think about uncertain times, I think, you know, every time we're in a different moment we say, oh it's so uncertain now, but we look past the last couple of years and like we've had a lot of moments and uncertainty and so as I think about my role, I don't focus on what's uncertain today. Instead I focus on what is certain about our strategy. What do we need to accomplish today? What do we need to accomplish tomorrow? and how do I set up a balanced portfolio investment so that we can hit our goals across a varied um duration of of time horizons, not necessarily just focusing on the moment. I think when we focus on the moment we often miss the strategy that we're trying to um deliver over a multi-year period. How you know? I would say that um. The worst thing that you can do during periods of uncertainty is to freeze and to stop investing. It can be really easy to um go internal and really. Focus and and and kind of freeze investments and I'd say you've got to really understand the growth drivers and you gotta trim where you need to but always think about. Innovation for the future and making sure that you're still investing behind that innovation because uncertainty is just a bound. The life that we live now since 2020, it's, it continues to be uncertain. We've talked about it all day today like there's just periods and things going on that. We've got to be able to think about what's going to be right for the company, not just in a year, but 57, 10 years down the road, and how do we make sure that we're really investing for the future despite the uncertainty and I think that's where the alignment between strategy and finance really works so beautifully. Yeah, no, I think, um, I completely agree and I think it's a balance, right? You have to understand your organization's sensitivities. You have to understand the different scenarios and plan for those, but also you can't just live for today. You have to really invest in the future and balance the resources, the capital allocation so critical, right? What do I need to fund today, but how am I ensuring that I'm growing in the. Future and what do I need to stop doing because not everything you start works out and that there's a constant we you know we have a very thorough initiative review that we do on an annual basis and there are sometimes really difficult decisions you have to make about OK this is not working, we have to stop and there are other priorities that we should be investing in and that's the rigor that we go through on an annual basis. I think so. I'm just gonna add one thing because I think AI can really help because the ability now to have AI really driving cost savings and efficiencies and the ability to take those resources and reinvest elsewhere. I think it's gonna be super powerful and you know there's been a lot of commentary about is the AI cycle real or hype and ROI is slow to come. What I can tell you is that internally at ServiceNow we're using AI in everything. We do. We've actually been able to realize over $350 million of savings that is driven by AI productivity gains. Now we've we've reinvested a good chunk of that $350 million back into the business. But also allowed about 100 million to fall to the bottom line this year alone. So AI is real and it's not just hype, um, and it's durable if you're using it right. And so I think that enables us to think differently about investing for the future if we're able to. You harness AI and really drive that productivity internally. I think it's I think when when you're talking to the CFO about AI, I think there's a nervousness around the CFO is just looking for efficiencies like what does, what does this mean for me? Is this just a cost saving effort and When I think about it, it's really about someone mentioned this this morning, capacity gains. So it's not necessarily, you know, hopefully we can drop something in the bottom line, but even if we don't, how do we create more capacity in the organization so that we're faster, we're quicker, we're smarter, and we can do more? Well, I think you get the credibility by telling people I'm not going to take all of. That savings and bring it to the bottom line you can utilize it to hire more people to drive um this growth area that we know we need to invest in but the dollars were scarce beforehand. So if you're able to really lean in with the business and show them that it's not just about pulling dollars to to the bottom line but really investing for their future. You get a lot more credibility with the business, especially when it's driving growth and driving business, right? I mean for us our most success has come in delivering solutions to our customers. So in our group life uh benefits business we've cut out essentially all the blood testing, the medical exams using AI models to underwrite uh life insurance in our individual life business we've cut down underwriting from 22 days to seconds that allows. Is to grow the business efficiently and so that's what really spurs more investment and I think from the capacity perspective, especially in finance for example what I tell my team is we need to create capacity so we could actually do really value add work right strategic partnership to the business helping them make decisions, insights about how the business is performing that is what we should be doing versus manual work that we do now because that will all be done with AI. In that sense, do you think that with the use of AI in some sense you are redefining the finance function in terms of the talent that you may need for the future? We're actually in the process of thinking through that right now, so we've been going through, and you and I have talked about this, Cheryl, the finance transformation that we're on a journey for about 3 years, and what we are doing now is we are redefining our processes, so the closed process. The forecast process with an eye towards and where do we insert agentic AI in the new process so not taking the old process but redesigning the process and at the same time on a parallel basis we took a step back over a year ago and we said, what are the skills of the future that we will need because we will need different skills critical thinking, really strong analytical skills, business acumen. Uh, which if somebody's booking things on a manual basis they don't need those skills today and that's something that we've been infusing through the organization at the same time so that when the processes are there we can hit the ground running. I would say we're taking a similar approach and I think the impetus on us as leaders is to make sure there's an excitement and an engagement around what this can unlock for our employees in terms of, frankly, higher impact work than they've been doing historically so they get excited they can get engaged and they can build their skill sets as they help the company. And um my hopefully she's in the audience but my one of my peers my chief people officer is now our chief people and AI enablement officer because yeah because it's so important to to ensure that the entirety of the workforce is enabled with the new technologies um and we're 27,000 employees but we have 3. Million learners who need to understand the ServiceNow platform whether they're customers or partners helping to implement as well as our own employees and how do we make sure that they are getting the skills of the future for finance specifically it will change and it will morph how do we make sure that we are not just spending so much time gathering data. manually inputting, finding the data, cleaning the data and just AI spits it out so that you are really spending time analyzing the data, working with the business, helping drive decision making. That's a very different skill set. I think a really interesting skill set and where most people enjoy spending their time. Want to ask you, Gina, since we're in DC, uh, federal agencies are having an increased demand in AI driven efficiency. So how is Service now positioning itself to take, um, part in the evolving government contract plans. So our federal business is actually one of the strongest businesses in our portfolio, and the reason for that is because the Service now platform drives exactly what this administration is looking for. Accountability, efficiency, and modernization at scale and so our business has more our federal business has more opportunity today than ever before. We're actually seeing some of the government agencies drive over 30% productivity using the ServiceNow AI platform and so we just recently announced a partnership with OneGov um with the GSA and that's about how do we. Allow these incredible agencies to scale more broadly and to transact more efficiently and effectively, and that's been going over really well. So excited to be here in in in DC, but the reason for it is because the the scalability of the platform and the and the ability for that platform to really drive incredible efficiency and cost savings, which is exactly what the administration is looking for. I want to go back to strategic partnerships. Um, Ellie, uh, Brian Chesky is Airbnb CEO, but he's also the co-founder of the company. Um, how's the dynamic shaped your approach, um, when working with the CEO who is a co-founder? Yes, some of you may have heard a lot about Founder mode a year ago, and if you'd like to talk about that separately, we'll have a whole session. Um, what, what I say about the relationship with the CEO and the CFO, I think every CFO role is somewhat defined by the type of CEO that you have, and in my case I not only have a founder as a CEO but also a designer, and I would say that creates, you know, some interesting opportunities and challenges. He went to design school. I went to business school, and it's caused me to really evolve my processes, you know, I, you know, kind of by profession and inclined towards. Thinking about the numbers, thinking about the size of the opportunity and working with the founder and the designer has really opened my aperture to think about how do we do enough ideation up front, how do we not self-edit ourselves to really, you know, slow down our creativity, but how do we open up the aperture up front, be as creative as we can, and through that process figure out, you know, from the vantage point of the CFO, how do we create baby steps to create a vision as coming from the CEO. It sounds like a really cool balance between a finance and I bet I bet it could be challenging at times too, but that relationship between CFO and CEO is so critical and so important, out of my curiosity, Ellie, what is your favorite Airbnb location that you. This is like the last panel. I mean it's like choosing among your children. I've stayed in a million great Airbnbs as we were chatting earlier, the most recent fantastic Airbnb I stayed in, I was in New Year's Eve. I was in Sydney and we drove to the Southern Highlands outside of Sydney and I stayed in this Gothic Georgian manor that had been recreated by the owner. And he provided the most unbelievable hospitality and what was effectively a museum with with appropriately curated items and the special thing about this hospitality was that it was clearly not a child friendly home, and I had my three small children with me and he paused upon accepting my request to book and he read all of my reviews to make sure that his lovely home would be served with my children and he accepted me. It was an amazing experience. Well, in, in our final minutes, uh, as we're at MPW, I wanted to ask each of you kind of if you can give us advice or or something of what shaped your career journey, your leadership journey, something that is poignant that you always reflect on. Yeah, so let me start. So I've, um, I've had the privilege of working at Prudential for 28 years. So essentially my entire career I've had many different jobs in finance in the business, but for me what's always been the driving force and what's energized me is the ability to have an impact. An impact on our customers, on our employees, on our company as a whole, and uh that's what gets me up at night and during the day impact and then understanding that we have a clear purpose to make life better by solving the financial challenges of our changing world, and those two things make it really exciting to come to work. Thank you. For me, I would say that curiosity and calculated risk taking have been Um, a very clear pathway through my entire journey. Um, you know, I moved, I, my whole career was in New York and I moved back in 2013 for a job in Southern California. My husband's English, whole family is in London, my whole family is in New York, and we moved with a 5 year old and a 2-year-old and a traveling spouse to California, we had no support. And I would say that was just one of many risks I took, and I took it for um You know, a deputy CFO role, a really big company, um, but it's also the curiosity piece, so I tend to switch industries or when I start to feel like I'm getting too comfortable is when I tend to make a change and And take a risk and so that ability to continue to learn and to really help coach others to think differently about their careers has been something that has been super fun for me to um to to mentor and I've got a few of my mentees that are now CFOs and I take such pride in that. I really think that the next generation of leadership has got to be not necessarily so deep, but really have a breath of learning experiences and be open to learning more and then have the ability to inspire others to continue to grow as well. Thank you, Gina and Ellie, really quick to round this out, I've been very lucky. To, you know, spend my career in in high growth scaling companies, but I think about the most important moments in my career were actually during crisis. So both many years ago at Netflix when we, we split the DVD and streaming businesses and lost 80% of market cap in 3 months, and more recently with Airbnb when the pandemic hit and the business effectively imploded. I bring those two moments up because they've been the most instrumental in my career in terms of understanding what does leadership look like in moments of crisis when you have a huge amount of uncertainty and you need to move forward. I think I've learned more from those moments of crisis than than frankly some of the successes. This is a great discussion. Thank you so much thank you Cheryl thank you.

The tech industry and the Department of Defense are collaborating more than ever. Meanwhile, conflicts in the Middle East, Ukraine/Russia, and elsewhere serve as a reminder of the critical role technology plays in both defensive and offensive capabilities. But how are innovations making it to the battlefield–and are entrenched procurement processes finally evolving? In this timely conversation, we hear from two industry insiders.

A New Era of Global Conflict

I want to start out by having both of you just explain a little bit more about your roles brought up for you past and and present actually for you too, Shannon, you have a very interesting background, so let's start with you. Yeah, well, thank you for having us and um Ron and I were joking. We know that we don't have Duchess in front of our name but we hope that you enjoy our session nonetheless um I'm Shannon Clark. um I started out my career as a. A counterterrorism intelligence officer, um, post 9/11 chasing al Qaeda throughout the Middle East and Europe, um, and then about 12 years ago transitioned, um, into the private sector where I have been for the last actually 13 years, um, on that same mission which is working for Palant here working and leading our defense and our growth there, um, with the same conviction of trying to do what we can to. Um, give technology to our war fighters, um, and in this day and age, which I think we've talked a lot about this morning, AI enabled technology, uh, to our warfighters to protect Americans and and our allies. Great, um, and hi, uh, yeah, so I, uh, I'm actually an economist by training, uh, statistician sort of applied statistics and had a number of roles at, um, Google and Facebook before I went into the government. Um, where I had a number of different roles trying to drive digital transformation in a very large and very old fashioned enterprise culminating in being the chief digital and AI officer in which I was in charge of delivery and scaling of all of the data and AI infrastructure for all functions across all of the Department of Defense so everything. From war fighting to business functions, um, I've recently joined IBM where I lead uh the transformation efforts both internally and linked to our overall, um, product strategy to drive enterprise transformation at scale both at home and uh with our customers and we're gonna hear more about whether it's more challenging to drive transformation within the bowels of the government or in corporations later. Um, but Shannon, if you could go back to your prior career as an intelligence analyst and just share with us a little bit about, you know, when you were on the field, what were the tools at your fingertips and then let's fast forward to today. Yeah, so I, you know, I was an intelligence analyst in the early 2000s post 9/11. Um, I became an intelligence analyst because I saw the Pentagon burning from my dorm room at Georgetown, um, and, um, was really driven to figure out what service could look like for someone that wasn't in the military. Um, and when I deployed to Afghanistan with, um, the military, I was like just kind of thrown in this like bunker if you will with like a hodgepodge of tools and really kind of told to figure it out and you know I never like to like say. Anything bad about Microsoft because Microsoft provides very good tools that we all use on a daily basis but really figuring out between like PowerPoint and different systems of like how to gather all this intelligence and how to make sense of it and how to figure out like you know the signal from the noise it was it was pretty impossible. Um, if you don't mind, like, I mean, I'd love to fast forward to today. Like now I kind of look back at myself and say for me because I think of what we, you know, are giving our war fighters today and the technology that our war fighters have available and that, you know, things that Rota and I have like very proudly worked together on, um, it's just a much different state of affairs. I mean the, the ways that they are able to just parse all this data, which has by the way, not like decreased in the last 15 years since I was an analyst, it's only increased, right? Um, but now the tools that they have available to them and everything that you know you all are seeing and you've talked about this morning that's even just available like when I listened to Corey talk about Best Buy like the way they're employing that is is in some ways no different than what the war fighter needs to, um, and so it's a much different atmosphere and I think we're really lucky that we are able to give them those tools because there's too much data in this world for them to be able to do it on their own like I did 15 years ago. Oh. Um, we talked yesterday with Tony Towns Whitley from SAIC about the Golden Dome project. I wanna ask you both about Project Maven, um, because I think it kind of fits into everything you're saying here and, and I guess for starters, can you describe Brada, maybe I'll start with you, um, describe what it is. I'm sure we've all seen it in the headlines over the last few years, but really what, what is it? What is it trying to accomplish and what were your respective roles here? Yeah, so sort of pre-IBM time when I was in the government, you know, the way you should think about the Pentagon is there's just a huge amount of data like any enormous enterprise, and that data all needs to come together really fast to help senior leaders make decisions. A lot of times those decisions are like understanding the world around you, being able to identify where things are and what they are to make decisions on are they threats, but also to be able. Track things that'll resonate a lot here like where are all the parts I need to maintain my equipment, where are the logistics I need? How do I connect things I've sent forward with the costs and finances to that to report back to our board of directors or the Pentagon's board of directors, which is the United States Congress, right? All of those pieces are all data elements that have to fit together and historically in the Department of Defense they did not, and the way they were. Combined with by people going literally swivel chair to multiple different computers and putting them in a PowerPoint slide, and when it is like the world around you that is changing over time, that swivel chair just gets updated slowly. People don't have full information about the world around them, and that makes it harder to make good decisions, but it also just makes it harder to even understand what the decision space is. So fast forward to. Main and sort of the work we did and then maybe I'll hand it over to Shannon because she's really seen Maven over time. Maven, the concept is about how do we integrate all this data to enable real-time decision making in practice that has lots of different applications, but at its core it's a data integration solution that then you can start layering all sorts of things on top of so that can be analytics and. And just sort of summaries of the world, but that can also be AI technology, new applications, whether they're from Palantir or other folks and creating that ecosystem of solutions so that warfighters, but also analysts and financial planners, logisticians can take into account what is happening in the world in real time at the speed they need to to make complete and accurate but also fast decisions. Yeah, I think you know Rata said it very well. I mean Project Maven Maven's goal was to be the Pathfinder AI program for the Department of Defense, and I think, you know, it started in 2017, which I think like thinking about that is eight years ago. I mean they were really almost ahead of where a lot of um industry was at the time, um, obviously that large language models weren't being um used then in the sense that they are now, but, um, you. You know, Roda and I had this, this huge mandate which was to figure out, and I think I heard a lot this morning about scale, how to scale AI across the entire Department of Defense, which or Department of War, which I don't what's the latest number of like how many people are in the department of war? I can't even, I mean, but then added like the layer of government bureaucracy on top of that so it's like, oh you have to scale this across like however many millions of people and by the way, like you know yeah and then. There's government bureaucracy which is, you know, another layer of hell, um, but it's, it's, and so we have this monumental task of doing that and I think that doesn't just include like what goes on in the department before but like you have to convince Congress like you have to convince the hill to like why you should fund this. You have to convince people that it's worth taking the risk. You have to convince them that like hey we might fail here but we're gonna try and fail fast and there's just like so many complicated layers to that and. Rada will be humble here, but she's she's an enabler and she is really great at figuring out the policy realm and how to do that too, which is critical for this. I wanna get back to the sale fast concept, um, but, but Rata, uh, you talk about how some of the shifts that you pushed for, it's not the, the sexy stuff, right? I mean, yes, there's the technology and everything we can do with AI now, um, for all. Purposes, right, including on the defense side, but, but talk about some of the changes that you think are really critical that you pushed for in your former role um that have big impact and that I think are kind of universal here. Yes, so I think it's helpful, you know, we talk about the Pentagon and we talk about war fighting and I think people imagine like fighter jets or tanks in plane, but taking a step back, think about what the Pentagon is. It is a. Almost $1 trillion enterprise that has 3 million people. It has more ground vehicles than FedEx. It has more airplanes than most major airlines. It has a supply chain 3 times that of Walmart. It has financial management that has to get reported routinely to a board that I mentioned, the United States Congress, and it has, you know, a school system. It runs land. It has to manage real estate. It needs to update. Contracts it needs to execute those are all functions that any enterprise, big or small, is going to be familiar with and enterprises that are large, obviously doing that at speed and accuracy, but also at the scale they need to is hard. And so a lot of what I did in my GBI role and sort of kind of the impetus for a lot of what I do now at IBM is really focused on those key enabling functions. I, I joke, you know, we. God bless the people who were at that pointy end of the spear. My husband was a submarine officer, they're, you know, we have people who are putting their lives literally at risk to do it, but they are the pointy end of the spear, and what makes that spear so strong and powerful is the lever arm, and that lever arm is the logistics. It is the supply chain. It is the financial management and the HR function. It's the procurement and the IT, right? All of those back office functions are. What make the department um really so um amazing and able to execute, you know, amazing missions and AI has the potential to transform those across the board, right? We see real potential. I'll use IBM as an example in HR and agentic solutions that can really streamline and make those HR processes faster. We see it again. I'll use IBM as an example in procurement and we. that at the department where agents and AI enablement can speed up how fast you can buy and deliver things and speeding that up means people have the things they need faster and better and those types of AI solutions are really where the data integrations and the platforms and the AI tools that Shannon talked about kind of where the rubber meets the road where we know that getting those solutions out. To warfighters faster in the case of MavenN or to, you know, enterprises is really where the secret sauce is. It's that scale and delivery piece and what would you say you learned from your Pentagon experience on the change management side that is kind of like, you know, just take pull that thread to your current role at IBM. Yeah, so I think, you know, a lot of times we want to focus on the sexy piece of like getting the AIH in or having the. Large language model that you can type a question and it generates, you know, answers and summaries that you couldn't get otherwise. A lot of the change management is on the back end. It's how do you solve those data problems, how do you solve the policy question Shannon mentioned, whether they're how to buy things and procurement and acquisition policy in the government or how to deploy things responsibly and make sure you've got the right governance rules in and how do you make sure you have all of the right data. Integrated, how do you orchestrate all of these tools together, right? So kind of working your way up the lay layers of the data infrastructure to that cool front end that users use is really a process of transformation management more than it is any particular technology solution we're not gonna be able to sprinkle AI on work flows and and see impact and you see that in a lot of studies there's an MIT study on. 95% of pilots failing to show ROI. I think the kind of magic of this MAVEN story is that it wasn't the proof of concept MAVEN that was so transformational. It was getting MAVEN in a matter of months out at scale to hundreds of thousands of users that transformed how the Department of Defense operated, and I think that story is a story more of transformation than it is of any individual piece of technology. Yeah, and just to add to that, and Ra and I talked a lot about this is like it's also about the ecosystem that surrounds it and like creating that ecosystem because there's not one company that can do all of this and you know, and when I was looking for a job 13 years ago and I was trying to find something that would like give me the mission like there were the hundreds of defense tech companies that there are today, you know, um, now we have this great eco. System where there's so many smart engineers that feel this mission that want that are drawn to it that want to do things for our national security and they founded some incredible companies and I think one of the things that we've both tried to do from both inside and outside of government is foster that community and lift each other because we know it's really hard in in the government to like work with the government we know that it's there's a lot of red tape sometimes like how do we foster that community to build each other up because. Because there's we need every, you know, we need all of these smart engineers to help us with all of the technology that we need to keep us safe, to keep our allies safe. I mean all of this technology was used for the 12 Day War. All of this technology was used for the conflict with Russia and Ukraine, and it'll be used for whatever the next conflict is as well, um, and so we really need America's best and brightest to be working on this and to be not just at like one company that's doing it all but being at several. I wanna go back to what you said about the sale fast contract and have you just uh explain to us um you know what the the testing process is there's been a lot of scrutiny on this recently whether it's battlefield communications platforms and elsewhere on the defense tech spectrum um how do you kind of take the best of Silicon Valley move fast, you know. Um, but apply it to this incredibly critical high stakes environment, yeah, I mean, I think anyone that's been, you know, experienced Silicon Valley knows that like failing and failing fast is like the best thing that you can do, right? Like we at Palanter, like there's been, you know, we have a hack week like 2 or 3 times. Here and it's always like, OK, build this thing we'll see if it succeeds if it does we'll move it into production you know you had a week to kind of build this thing and then hack it together um and then if it does like well maybe we'll move it to production and if it doesn't like, you know, that's OK like we tried something new and this is where we failed and maybe that failure teaches us something else. On the government side, like, as I was saying, like they're so used to building like jet planes and so used to like building big pieces of hardware that were expensive and nobody ever wanted to take a risk about, you know, spending more than, you know, taking one company to build that thing in the age of software and all the software technology, it's like it's a lot more, it's a lot easier to say hey we're we're actually going to take risks and so I. Actually applaud the government right now because they are taking more risks and saying like OK maybe we'll have we'll test 2 or 3 different companies we'll pay them each like a little bit and then we'll test this out because some of them might fail and that's OK because the failures of one of them might like inform what we think we need more inform our requirements better to build to make sure that when we like pick this other company that like we know what those requirements should look like and they're and they're like more um. Cohesive so I think the government is taking that on in large part because they've seen what the the companies in in Silicon Valley are doing. They're spending a lot of time there with these companies they're going out there more and more, um, and I think they're seeing that like that's the only way that we're going to be able to forge forward faster is by watching and failing and then learning from those mistakes just as much as learning from success and I think what's so important I agree with what Shannon said I think. What's so important is how do you build a a safe environment for people to be able to fail in and I don't mean like a test or a test bed or sandbox so that can be a way. It is how do you build the culture and the incentives and the tolerance and that's gonna look different in different places, right? Some of it is top down leadership. I saw that at the Pentagon building that I see it at IBM building that like that. Leadership kind of um managing through some of it is creating a mechanism to do it but some of it is just kind of having a process that people can be comfortable with like at IBM we have this uh we drink our own champagne client zero type model where we can test products and use them for internal transformation to let them fail, but also then figure out how they succeed and that's kind of like a go to market. that's gonna look different than in the government where you want to have multiple vendors and let some of them fail because if you are not failing if you're not testing with your own champagne or with multiple companies or whatever version that looks like you're not at the frontier of what is possible and if you wanna be at the frontier of what where transformation can be you have to figure out a way in your enterprise to get comfort. Within that I think is like the value of what's happening at you and I, I think the other thing I would add is like we always believe in never doing this in a lab and never doing it in a silo because then when you get to the real game day it's like oh well it didn't work well that's because you had perfect internet and you, you know, and it's like so I did see that Starlink is now available on United like globally and I watched this morning as they were like live streaming I got very excited that we may all have better internet on our flights soon. Um, but it's like you need to make sure that and I was thinking about the testing they did for that you need to make art that they. Oh I noticed a few people leaving, OK. Let's pause, OK, figure out what's happening and reconvene.

With an annual revenue of approximately $7.5 billion, SAIC Inc. (Science Applications International Corporation) is one of the largest tech contractors for the U.S. government, with a mission to strengthen and transform America’s national security and critical infrastructure. Against the backdrop of President Trump’s proposed Golden Dome for America, Toni Townes-Whitley, ranked number 82 on the 2025 MPW list, joins us to discuss working with the government to keep Americans safe, and the continually evolving landscape of emerging technology.

Powering National Security

Tony, we are speaking about national security at the same time that we just saw this historic ceasefire agreement between Israel and Gaza. At the same time, I think we all know that over the last few years we have seen a rise in global conflict, not just in the Middle East but elsewhere as we just heard. And we've also seen that the nature of war warfare has has changed. So I want to start by just asking you to tell all of us in the room here what do we need to be thinking about, what do you see as the biggest shift, um, you know, both the rise and again just the changes in how wars are fought today. So what we're seeing initially as you've mentioned a couple of the regional conflicts, you can't look at the situation in Israel, the situation, uh, quite frankly in North Korea, around the world, the various regional conflicts throughout Europe and the Middle East, and, and not see the effect of aerial warfare, just the absolute modernization speed and scale of aerial warfare. We see the introduction of various emerging technologies like hypersonics, electronic warfare, different kinds of capabilities around uh aerial systems, and it immediately challenges the speed and scale with which the US has traditionally thought about its perimeter defense. Those areas where we had large seas or oceans between us and adversaries are no longer the boundary conditions that we have experienced. We have adversaries that operate in multiple domains that go beyond land, sea, and air, but cyber and space. So in a multi-domain environment, our ability to understand the threat, see the threat, react. Is one that is more connected by data and the ability to integrate data across so many different nodes, uh, and being able to do that in a predictive way. How we build whether it be munitions or weapons systems changed by digital engineering and different digital forces and opportunities and so with a company like SAIC we've for 57 years kind of been at the intersection of commercial technology being introduced to very austere and difficult complex mission environments and we have to acknowledge that we are also um. Engaged with a peer adversary that is operating on multiple modes. Not just in terms of militaristic, economic, um, political. And and cyber and all the various attacks, and I think one of the things that probably keeps us up at night in the national defense world is the fact that our adversary can use their entire industrial base. They leverage every aspect of their industrial base. Some of our industrial base, what we call our defense industrial base has grown anachronistic over time, has aged with legacy capability as we introduce new commercial technologies, and we haven't really seen the urgency of the signal yet. That we need to in fact enlist all of our industrial base. In fact, I think I wear this bracelet. Many of my team does, it's not an exciting bracelet, so it's not out there for your uh purchase for those of you who are on the, you know, on the bizarre floor there, but um. WID TIW, which I pulled that bracelet from another phenomenal leader, Alexis Bonnell from the Air Force Research Lab, but she had everyone wearing the bracelet. WID TIW says, would I do this in war? The urgency that she was holding her team accountable that make every decision as if you were doing this in a war environment. The balloon has gone up. How do we, because there's things we do as a country that are amazing when we've got a threat right in front of us. The question is, how do you keep that pace, that urgency, that prioritization when the threat may be a bit diffused or you don't have a clear sense of timing. Um, you touched on this a bit just talking about data. I think we still, we kind of we think warfare, we think missiles, kinetic warfare. Just real briefly explain what SAIC does, has been doing for a long time, and then I want to get to what's changing today. Yeah, so for a long time we've talked about bringing more technology. Uh, into and moving, if you will, the way we think about national security, both our critical infrastructure as well as defense and the intel space with more emerging technologies around AI obviously which we call sort of operational AI that is AI for the battlefield, if you will, for the war fighter. Uh, but, but data, um, data integration, data migration, cloud, cloud-based, secure cloud-based capabilities, digital engineering, uh, robotics, and, and all things that I know people are tracking on the electronic, I'm sorry, on the tech front. I think we see an equation evolving at SAIC. Because of our legacy, the equation says that to operate moving forward in the current environment with which we have to not only protect the United States but its allies as well and go in coalition environments, we have to have enough mission experience to know what a great mission outcome looks like. You have to have enough digital experience and technology to know what works in different mission environments and what we're solving for in a deductive way. And you've got to know how to integrate those two because legacy, we're not gonna walk away from all of our legacy platforms and capabilities, but how do you introduce new? And then you have to add to that an ecosystem. I would argue that the words that we use are even anachronistic. Defense industrial base, I would suggest is transitioning to a national security innovation ecosystem. If we're going to be able to compete. And protect and do the types of work that we do out of the defense and intel sector, we have to have an ecosystem focused on national security, not just physical perimeter, but quite frankly critical infrastructure here in the US, which is as much a target as what we're used to in terms of military bases, and we have to then engage the technologies with the knowledge of the mission to build an ecosystem when we, for example, when we think about counter UAS or counter on. Unmanned aerial systems, like drone attacks were particularly on display in Ukraine. And the ability for a $10,000 drone or a $500 drone to take out an exquisite multi-million dollar system was on display. So counterattacks, counter UAS is a critical area for the Department of Defense war depending on how you reference it for national security. And yet when you look at that, when we bring a solution around that, we bring about 40 partners to the table. We bring garage startup capability all the way to a hyper scalar like a Microsoft or an AWS or others, and we're doing that because you have to be able to plug and play new technologies into existing, and that has to work in a mission environment. You've got to be able to demonstrate that outcome. So I think where SAIC feels like it's position. we have the history of the mission. We have that passion. A third of our company, uh, our veterans, and we've had a chance to engage with some of the female veterans here and we're so thankful for your service. 2/3 of my company have have some form of classified security clearance, but to operate in this new world order, it's not enough to just be a part of the ecosystem. You gotta build it. You've got to bring in companies, you gotta bring in startups, you got to engage with large players, and you gotta be able to demonstrably prove. The least sexy word right now in national security, but the most important, which is interoperability. If things can't work, imagine a coalition war fight where you've got 9 coalition partners, 9 other countries. You've got to get data to war fighters that are of different classification levels, and all the 9 countries have their own classification levels. Now we're talking about what feels like a large language model to determine how you get that data just in time and only that data that they are allowed to see by way of access. This sounds like the nerdiest example I can tell by your faces. I need to find something new. I get it. Geeky folks enjoy this. We do. But the fundamental piece of this is we can't do coalition war fighting unless data could be integrated, integrated across legacy and new, and integrated across many, many different platforms. That's why companies like SAIC exist, and that's quite frankly what gets us up in the morning. So let's make this more real. I think we've all heard about and Read about the Golden Dome missile defense system which there's an initial budget for at least 25 billion. um, can you talk a little bit about just just kind of take us through how your what your role is in this and how this kind of ecosystem approach comes into play here? Is this an opportunity for that? It is, and I think quite frankly it is, it's an integration opportunity first. It's an architecture. Because to understand Golden Dome is to understand that this country has invested in all five of those domains, whether it be air, land, sea, cyber, or space, we've invested lots of technology and capability. The issue isn't that we don't have sufficient tech. We do, we can obviously improve and move on. The issue is how do you integrate that in a golden dome environment that is by definition uh multi. Varied equation that has to be solved for across multiple domains and different kinds of technology and capabilities and so a company like SAIC can prove out pieces of that through simulation through digital twins. We can show where you're able to, as we've done with NORAD, one of the, the um uh combatant commands within the military, how you can get to a common operating picture by integrating data from multiple sources and whether that's legacy or new. And how we can understand what the continuous surveillance of that airspace looks like. We do that by also operating in what we call the LEO or the low Earth orbiting satellite world, which suggests that space is now a contested arena for for threat. We have obviously commercial space ventures that are interesting and and are important for this country, but space is also a tactical threat environment for protecting this country and protecting our coalition partners, and Golden Dome has to operate across all five of those domains with architecture that's integrated so we spend some time demonstrating, simulating, prototyping, as well as showing where we deliver that in different parts uh across the department. of Defense. And then let's go to, you know, something like FAA. Part of understanding the modernization of our airspace just as travelers, as civilian travelers, is knowing how do we surveil the US airspace, how do we protect it, and how do we use traffic control capability and modernization. So if you're going to play in the Golden Dome space, and we don't think it's a big bang, you'll hear that trust me, Golden Dome has been called everything and everyone's in it right now. It's kind of a trendy thing to talk about, but the fundamental distinctions between who's sort of playing and engaging in that space will be who can operate with an architecture that can integrate. Who can demonstrate in small packets in simulation what sort of defending defending the airspace looks like, who can create a common operating picture, and who can do that with coalition partners around the world. So we feel like we're pretty well situated, but it's not, as I said, it's not just a thrust, a single thrust. This is sort of what we do every day. I think it's in the DNA of the company. Um, I'm gonna go to you guys for questions if you have a question for Tony, please, uh, we already have one. You can go ahead and ask it now then. Uh, there's a microphone coming over to you. Locked and loaded. I didn't plan this, but it's so great to hear you. Yes, so my name is Ashley Tappin. I'm with Insignia. We're a consulting firm and we're one of the sponsors for the NPW, um. I'm curious a couple questions. One, when you talk about the anachronism that you're dealing with in this industry in the defense industry, how do you as a leader, get people to think differently and act differently so that they can speed up the the modernization of these anachronistic, uh. Sure. Infrastructures and then my second question is, um, what do you make of the of the context of calling the United States Defense Department now the Department of War? Which you're still getting used to obviously evidently you can see I'm still working through it um um I'll take that first question first. hey, um. So Look, I think one thing that we, we as a company do, but I think obviously there are many companies in our space, and we do a lot of simulation and digital twins and abilities to put a scenario, show the, uh, if you will, the acceleration of that scenario, what good can look like, how fast we can move. There's a lot of focus coming out of the department of war right now relative to speed to the war fighter, speed, speed, getting technology direct commercial tech into these important commands. One way to do to show what is slow, what is slowing the process, often it's not tech, it could be policies that have been created over time. It can be authorities that are, we have some stove pipes across our military and Intel, and so oftentimes we use simulation as a way of saying if we solve for X this is how fast we can move like reverse engineering, we need to get this quickly. Let's now look at all of the gaps across that root cause analysis. And so that's one. Even when you look at munitions and weapons systems, we've learned so much using tech. We use digital engineering to recreate the production line for the Mark 48 torpedo, the heavyweight torpedo, that it's going to be obviously critical if you think about the Indo-Pacific and long distances where we have to protect the country, but it was recreated after World War II by digital engineering, so you can use tech to recreate a munitions line, a production line. So there's a lot that we use with technology. How do I talk about DOW versus DOD? Let me just say that I think Uh, whatever we call the organization, here's what I love about, um, working in defense and I am a military brat and I've got a 3 star at home, OK, 91 year old father who is my roommate and, and he enjoys reading the National Defense Authorization Act, which is concerning. I, I'm trying to introduce him to Netflix and Hulu, but he is not there yet. So, uh, for those military in the room, I do a sit wrap or a situation report at 2100 hours every evening. Uh, with, uh, three-star retired, uh, Lieutenant General Cash McCall, who was first African American, by the way, as the Comptroller of the Army. Super proud of his 41 years. Super proud of my military family, and that's Air Force, Marine, and Navy and my family. And of course my service decision was Peace Corps. I copped out and did Peace Corps. Now I say all that to say, you know, how do we, what's important is that we, we respect the service of our service individuals that we respect the service, whatever we call the department. It's important that we respect what these individuals do and that we never lose sight of the sacrifice. Many of them are on multiple deployments in ways that I didn't experience when I was growing up. And we have a smaller group of individuals defending our country in many austere places over and over and over again. So the name we can go left or right on the name. My whole focus is support the war fighter in all that we do, our language, our actions, our resources, our budget support the warfighter. And those are great questions, thank you. Um, I want to just end on on this quick note, um, we, we had the pleasure of having Tony also speak in front of our veterans who you will all meet later and so got to hear a lot more about her dad, but thank you so much for being here sharing with us and with the veterans. Thank you, appreciate that appreciate all of this sounding. this one, thank you so much.

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