Henry Choi’s long career is not short on qualifications: In addition to bachelor’s and master’s degrees in engineering, Choi earned management certifications from the University of Chicago, the University of California, Los Angeles and the Thunderbird School of Global Management. Further still, he logged more than 30 years at Northrop Grumman in leadership roles within the company’s space, airborne and information technology arms.
Following his decades with Northrop, Choi took on a business development position at CACI International, helping to shape and integrate its then-recently acquired Lucent Government Solutions Lab business. In early 2022, Choi arrived at HII, where he is currently vice president of growth and strategy for the organization’s cyber, electronic warfare and space segment. His work at HII focuses on market growth, strategy and client engagement.
In a recent Executive Spotlight interview, Choi spoke with GovCon Wire about how he and HII’s cyber, EW and space team are envisioning concepts and technologies like artificial intelligence and open-source intelligence’s importance in the global defense arena, among other topics.
What trends do you see in the global defense landscape moving the GovCon market?
In today’s data-informed battlefield, agile decision-making is paramount. AI-powered data analytics are a key enabler to providing actionable information to warfighters quickly. Leveraging AI and big data can enhance decisions in various ways. Providing data-driven course of action recommendations, insight into the adversary’s patterns of life, algorithm-based battlefield calculations and AI/ML technologies are a few areas we see shaping the GovCon market.
The need for information sharing between mission partners and open-source intelligence are on the rise, how is your organization adapting to these needs?
We are seeing more solutions being pushed into the cloud and more data sources feeding open-source intelligence — or OSINT — solutions. Reliance on mission partners and coalitions is critical in the era of the great power competition. U.S. defense is stronger with support from regional allies that bring additional capability. HII is investing in cloud-centric and AI-enabled solutions, and we are researching new ways to share information through everything from popular architectures like Zero Trust to still-evolving initiatives like homomorphic encryption.
Where do you think the AI market is heading and where are you seeing new opportunities in AI?
The artificial intelligence market is exploding. It is as disruptive as any industrial inflection point in history. You now see the term “Industry 4.0” where AI and robotics are going to create an entirely new era of efficiencies. HII Mission Technologies was an early mover in AI. We have experience deploying AI in a wide range of applications, including sensor signal processing, situational awareness, cyber and information operations. The market continues to revolutionize. We went from the first large language models to multi-modal models to generative AI in just over three years. Like other market experts, we firmly believe that generative AI will quickly surpass the achievements and market impacts of all prior AI achievements to date.
Where do you see an opportunity to deliver advanced capabilities to warfighters?
As part of its shift toward data-centric operations, the Department of Defense recognizes that the data fabric layer is a critical element in connecting and enabling an all-domain force. The data fabric, applied at both the enterprise level as well as at the tactical edge, ingests vast amounts of information from disparate sources across the battlespace. For over a decade, Enlighten, an HII company, has been delivering data fabric solutions through government off-the-shelf big data solutions. We see opportunity to partner with the services and COCOMs to operationalize the Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control operational requirements through our big data solutions.
We also see information superiority and cyberwarfare as a decisive advantage. HII’s fielded offensive and defensive cyber capabilities deliver the advantage to our warfighters. We still have more work to do, and harnessing AI to augment our warfighters’ decisions is going to be critical. HII has been investing in AI/ML for a long time, and we are strengthening our cyber capabilities by leveraging years of AI/ML independent research and development investments.
