Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer (CDAO) Activities

The Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer (CDAO), falls under the Office of the Secretary of Defense and is part of the Research, Development, Test & Evaluation, Defense-Wide budget activity. The specific goals and objectives of this program include supporting the Department's initiatives to build enduring advantage and a resilient Joint Force and defense ecosystem. The CDAO is responsible for strengthening and integrating data, artificial intelligence, and digital solutions in support of the National Defense Strategy and Section 1513 of the National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2023. The program aims to lead and oversee the DoD’s strategy development and policy formulation for data, analytics, and AI; break down barriers to data and AI adoption; create enabling digital infrastructure and services; selectively scale and provide digital and AI-enabled solutions focused on enterprise and joint use cases; and surge digital services.

Additionally, the program includes activities such as AI Acquisition Training, which aims to provide technical assessments through the project lifecycle, traceability, reliability, safe systems from design to deployment, as well as Responsible AI (RAI) and AI Governance Tools. These activities are designed to develop, procure, and maintain necessary commercial and DoD-customized tools to put the DoD AI Ethical Principles into practice across the entire AI product lifecycle. This includes integrating commercially available tools such as Explainable AI tool, Synthetic Data & Anonymization tool, Data Management and Traceability tool, Continuous Integration/Continual Delivery tool, Auto-Machine Learning tool, Bias Mitigation tool, and Interference Time tool into the developer’s workflow to operationalize the DoD AI Ethics Principles. The program also funds the development of DoD-customized assessments and tools that RAI leads will use across the AI product and acquisition lifecycles. These efforts are aimed at ensuring that all AI-enabled systems are safe, adhere to ethical standards, contribute to efficiency, effectiveness, and legitimacy of the Department’s AI capabilities as outlined in relevant defense strategies.