ORGANIZATION

Our Mission

The CDAO is responsible for accelerating DoW adoption of data, analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI) from the boardroom to the battlefield to enable decision advantage. This mission has two parts:

Advancing deterrence

by ensuring our warfighters have the best digital capabilities.

Beating bureaucracy

by ensuring our critical business functions have the digital solutions to deliver for warfighters and taxpayers.

Our Approach

The CDAO approaches this broad mission by aligning its efforts into three categories:

ENABLE:

The CDAO enables the DoW’s adoption of data, analytics, and AI by setting formal standards, delivering best practices, building templates and tools, and defining acquisition pathways to deliver capabilities directly to DoW users.

SPEED:

The CDAO invests in equipment and staff expertise to develop and deliver solutions that meet cross-cutting and emergent requirements on an accelerated timeline.

SCALE:

The CDAO focuses on the delivery of large, central enterprise platforms that include data stacks; development environments and test and evaluation tools to build capabilities; the data, analytic, and AI enabled products that spread insights across the enterprise; and the assurance processes to build an interoperable ecosystem of platforms and products that are technically sound, secure, and work together to deliver real value.

Enablers

AI adoption is fundamentally governed by a set of key enablers. The CDAO aligns these key enablers in a “Hierarchy of Needs.”

At the top of the pyramid is Responsible AI, the DoW’s dynamic approach to the design, development, and use of AI capabilities. We employ a use-case-driven approach to pinpoint where AI can deliver the highest return on investment, while ensuring that its application aligns with our ethical principles and meets stringent cyber and operational requirements.

The middle of the pyramid is insightful analytics and metrics. We need useful, meaningful, and accurate data-driven insights that allow us to understand specific domains. This analytic process can help identify potential areas for improvement.

The foundation of this pyramid, which makes everything function, is quality data. While it is important to focus on the algorithms that power new capabilities, they are ineffective without reliable, high-quality data.

Our History

Digital transformation through integrated leadership and investment strategies

2021
COLLABORATIVE
2022 - 2023
CONSOLIDATED
2024 - 2025
ALIGNED

2021

Four separate organizations within OSD — the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC), Defense Digital Service (DDS), the Chief Data Officer (CDO), and the Advana program from within Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller) — collaborate on digital transformation

CDO and JAIC partner to kick-off the AI and Data Accelerator initiative for Combatant Commands

Advana partners with CDO in advancing executive analytics and federated data cataloging

DDS performs independent analysis providing recommendations for Advana and CDO

2022 - 2023

Organizations are consolidated as a Principal Staff Assistant (PSA)

Supporting Tier of Governance forum, CDAO Council, established

Data, Analytics and AI Adoption Strategy released, with the AI Hierarchy of Needs prioritizing precursors necessary for sustainable AI at scale

CDAO assumes leadership of USNORTHCOM's Global Information Dominance Experiment series

CDAO assumes leadership for SUNet and begins rationalizing enterprise platforms and services

2024 - 2025

New acquisition approach to advance a marketplace of data-driven tech stacks (Open DAGIR), aligns Advana and key AC2A capabilities to an improved open data standards architecture

President’s AI Action plan released with three overarching pillars: Accelerate AI Innovation, Build American Infrastructure, and Lead in International AI Diplomacy and Security

CDAO realigned under the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (USD(R&E)) to accelerate department-wide AI transformation

CDAO launched www.GenAI.mil, a resource for all DoW military, civilian, and contract employees to utilize generative Artificial Intelligence tools that are certified safe for Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI), or Information Level 5 (IL5).