This is the 10th article in our IT lifecycle management series, Delivering the tech that delivers for government.
Don’t mistake invention for innovation. It’s easy to do, BAE System’s Peder Jungck points out.
“The thing that’s changed is the pace of what I would call innovation, which is not necessarily the same as invention,” said Jungck, chief innovation and strategy officer for the intelligence and security sector at BAE Systems.
Right now, it’s an “incredible time” to talk about innovation and how capabilities available from three emerging technologies — artificial intelligence, autonomy and automation — can catapult how and how fast organizations meet their missions, he said during an interview with Federal News Network.
To illustrate that invention versus innovation idea, Jungck pointed to cloud. Sure, companies were developing and inventing technology solutions and refining how to manage data and compute. But the rapid move to cloud ultimately “was about a business model change. It was about really an innovative approach of who’s deploying capital,” Jungck said.
Today, emerging capabilities possible through AI, autonomy and automation are creating the opportunity for radically reinventing new business models across the classic triad of people, policy and technology.
For our series Delivering the tech that delivers for government, Jungck shared how BAE Systems sees that transformation shaping up and how the company is innovating its own enterprise technology to support innovation within federal agencies.
Recalibrating federal risk factors of innovation
The demand signals have changed, he said. “If we look at our new administration, it’s talking about changing that risk equation … so that it’s not the government taking the risk of what might work.”
To that end, BAE Systems created a new organizational strategy, A3, to leverage AI, autonomy and automation to “transform the way our business is working going forward,” Jungck said. Through this new organization, “we’re connecting people. We’re connecting ideas. Those are critical in identifying the need and what might be the answer.”
Maybe that doesn’t seem radical, but it’s the infusion of these modern technologies that will fundamentally drive change and allow for innovation in real time, he said.
Jungck acknowledged that the government and federal systems integrators work in a process-oriented culture. While early narrow AI approaches and automation have improved many processes, it’s now time to apply AI, automation and autonomy collectively to reimagine them — and in multiple ways simultaneously, he said.
“It’s about how do you try a new, novel outcome? The scale of the AI can try things from a vast variety of means,” Jungck said. “It’s not just us having a human say, ‘Here’s how you do it.’ You can actually come up with, for the given equation, how best would you automate it? And if your process didn’t automate the same way every time, could it actually unleash something?”
Testing and rethinking government missions in real time
For early iterations of automation, humans defined the process and then the ensuing automation followed a set pattern. But now, using large language models and autonomy — or agentic AI — it’s possible to quickly identify how people, policy and technology can achieve outcomes in entirely new ways.
For instance, consider the government’s work along the U.S. southern border, on a battlefield or in a security operations center.
Along the border, “there’s hundreds of miles of different types of situations,” Jungck said. “We do not have enough Border Patrol agents.” But could the use of autonomous vehicles and large language models help change how agents do their jobs?
Yes, Jungck said. By applying AI to continuous live inputs and existing data, agents could get real-time recommendations to help prioritize their activities and leave less critical work to automated capabilities and what he called a new era of digital labor. The goal: “How do you not just support a person, but how do you give them access to things to be able to say, ‘Hey, maybe you should go over here, maybe you should go there.’ ”
In battlefield, intelligence and cyberthreat scenarios, the use of AI, autonomy and automation similarly could help plot out responses to black swan events that right now are too expensive to test out, he said. “The team can explore, what would you do in those scenarios … that shouldn’t happen, but if it did? All three provoke a new outcome.”
Innovating securely and continuously
All these efforts to speed innovation and mission delivery must happen against a backdrop of continuous cybersecurity evolution, and the move to zero trust aligns well with the desire to innovate iteratively, Jungck said.
“The great thing is, I believe our government understands how to do this,” he said. Getting to a zero trust world of managed identities, tagged data and end-to-end visibility remains an ongoing journey. The tricky part is that zero trust requires that organizations must continuously re-evaluate and improve their cyber practices, Jungck said.
But here again, AI, autonomy and automation can help organizations better manage the security of their IT enterprises.
“This is where the volume of data is at such a large scale, you can’t use humans to necessarily tag and do everything. That’s where we’re using the AI, the automation,” Jungck said.
The challenge is to keep ahead of adversaries who also are deploying AI tools — to spot vulnerabilities at velocity when a new patch or a new piece of software comes online.
“If we can’t make our cybersecurity defense run at the same velocity of the attackers, or faster, you’re never going to be able to go and defend this and be able to really take advantage of the data economy that we have,” he said.
Although Jungck offered that cautionary note on cybersecurity, he remains optimistic about the opportunities for innovation across government.
“There is an openness for, ‘Hey, how could we do this better?’ … And people are asking for, ‘How do I go faster?’ ” The resistance to change is diminishing as a desire for keeping pace on innovation is rising, Jungck said.
He also identified another critical reality. “From senior leadership all the way down, we’re digital natives, and the digital has caught up.”
Discover more stories about how federal systems integrators and government contractors manage their enterprise infrastructure environments in our series Delivering the tech that delivers for government, sponsored by Future Tech Enterprise.
To listen to the full discussion between BAE Systems’ Peder Jungck and Federal News Network’s Vanessa Roberts, click the podcast play button below:
Check out all podcast episodes of the Delivering the tech that delivers for government series.
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