The Central Intelligence Agency’s Chief Technology Officer Nand Mulchandani has joined the lineup of Intelligence Community decision makers who will speak at the Potomac Officers Club’s 2024 Intel Summit on Sep. 19. Join the Intel Summit to learn more about IC priorities, expand your GovCon network and meet intelligence leaders face to face.
Read below for more information about Intel Summit keynote speaker Nand Mulchandani.
Who Is Nand Mulchandani?
Nand Mulchandani, winner of Executive Mosaic’s prestigious Wash100 Award, became the CIA’s first-ever chief technology officer in April 2022. In his role as CIA CTO, Mulchandani works to leverage cutting-edge tech innovations to support the agency’s intelligence missions.
Mulchandani’s 25-year career thus far includes extensive experience in Silicon Valley, the private sector and the Department of Defense. Prior to his current position, Mulchandani served as the CTO and acting director of the DOD’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center. At JAIC, Mulchandani was instrumental in realigning the organization through a new strategy and operating plan. He also led JAIC’s products group and oversaw the group’s technology spend of more than $180 million per year.
In the private sector, Mulchandani was the co-founder and CEO of multiple startups, such as Oblix, Determina and OpenDNS — acquired by Oracle, VMWare and Cisco, respectively. Mulchandani began his career as a compiler engineer at Sun Microsystems.
The CIA CTO earned his degree in Computer Science and Math from Cornell, a Master of Science in Management from Stanford Business School and a Master in Public Administration from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
Nand Mulchandani’s Priorities
Harnessing Artificial Intelligence
The CIA has embraced AI in recent years. The agency currently uses an open-source large language model called Osiris, and Mulchandani has been a vocal advocate for AI usage within the CIA.
“CIA is all in 100% on utilizing these technologies and scaling them,” he said in an interview with the Associated Press. “We are taking this as seriously as we’re taking probably any technology issue. We think we’ve beaten the initial timeline by a big margin, as we’re already using Gen AI tools in production. The deeper answer is that we’re on the early side of a huge number of additional changes, and a large part of the work is to integrate the technology more widely into our applications and systems. These are early days.”
Mulchandani said the CIA is primarily using AI for summarization, helping CIA analysts more quickly and efficiently make sense of the vast amounts of data and information they collect every day.
However, generative AI tools and technologies may not be suitable for every use case, and Mulchandani urges caution when approaching gen AI, especially as it’s still in its early stages of development.
“When these generative AI systems ‘hallucinate,’ they can sometimes behave like your drunk friend at a bar who can say something that pushes you outside your normal conceptual boundary and sparks out-of-the box thinking,” he told AP. “So for creative tasks like art, poetry, and painting these systems are excellent. But I wouldn’t yet use these systems for doing precise math or designing an airplane or skyscraper—in those activities ‘close enough’ doesn’t work.”
Bringing DOD Into the Digital Age
Mulchandani has also called for the DOD to embrace a new era of modernization through technology and software. In September 2022, Mulchandani co-authored a report titled “Software-Defined Warfare: Architecting the DOD’s Transition to the Digital Age” with Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan, JAIC’s inaugural director.
“For the United States military to retain its dominant position in the future – which is not a guaranteed outcome – the DOD needs a new design and architecture, based on technology, that will allow it to be far more flexible, scale on demand, and adapt dynamically to changing conditions. And it must do so at a dramatically lower cost,” wrote Mulchandani and Shanahan.
“It is extremely important for DOD to begin the transition from an industrial-age, hardware-centric organization to a digital-age, software-centric one,” the report continued.
Nand Mulchandani to Keynote 2024 Intel Summit
The CIA CTO is slated to deliver the morning keynote address at the Potomac Officers Club’s 2024 Intel Summit on Sep. 19. Don’t miss your chance to meet, learn from and network with Nand Mulchancani at one of the most highly-anticipated events of the year!
Other keynote speakers at the 2024 Intel Summit include IARPA’s William Benard and the FBI’s Ryan Young. Panel discussions at this event will focus on topics like AI, OSINT, Intelligence Community IT priorities, data and the great power competition. Register today to join the conversation.
