Col. Chris Anderson from the U.S. Army’s Program Executive Office Intelligence, Electronic Warfare and Sensors said the service wants Project Linchpin to serve as an artificial intelligence pipeline that would enable program managers to facilitate the integration of machine learning and AI capabilities in their portfolios, Defense One reported Monday.
Anderson, program manager for intelligence systems and analytics at PEO IEW&S, told the publication in an interview that Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node will be the first program to use Project Linchpin, which is expected to become a program of record by 2026.
“So as we looked at our problem within my portfolio, and then the PEO looked at it across the board, we realized we had to have some sort of AI pipeline to create these models and algorithms to deploy to all our platforms,” Anderson said of the rationale behind Project Linchpin.
“The other thing we realized: it was going to be prohibitively expensive in both dollars and people to try for every PM shop to build their own AI pipeline. So we just sort of centralized it under [intelligence systems and analytics], focusing on Titan initially and then expanding to the rest of the PEO portfolio,” he added.
The colonel said the Army has issued two requests for information and received over 100 responses with plans to release another RFI in the summer and hold an industry day by September.
Anderson said the service expects to release a request for proposals by early fiscal year 2024 and start awarding contracts on a larger scale by the first quarter of FY 2024.
“But what I’ve been messaging the industry is it’s not just going to be one RFP. This will probably be a series of contracts to do different parts of the pipeline, whether that’s data labeling, verification and validation, training models. It’s going to take multiple industry partners and multiple contracts to do that,” he added.
