Solving Operational Problems with Today’s Technology: Launching the Apex Conference Series

Image Source: A US Marine pilots a Skydio unmanned aerial system during an amphibious landing for Northern Coast 2023 in Ventspils, Latvia, on September 12, 2023. (Jesus Sepulveda Torres via DVIDS)

Ahead of Apex, April 23-24 2025, we are collaborating with Defense & Aerospace Report to discuss pressing topics and stimulate creative thought, with the goal of facilitating collaborative solutions within the defence ecosystem.

Top takeaways:

• Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) 3.0 focuses on synchronizing warfighter needs with commercial capabilities, catalyzing the innovation ecosystem, and delivering results at speed and scale. This builds on DIU 1.0 (building bridges to Silicon Valley) and DIU 2.0 (demonstrating the ability to access commercial tech through new contracting approaches).
• Replicator is an initiative focused on rapidly innovating and fielding new capabilities, pulling them years earlier than normal timelines would. The first Replicator initiative is focused on all-domain attritable autonomous systems, with the goal of fielding thousands of systems within 18 to 24 months.
• The mission of the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) is to accelerate the DoD’s adoption of data analytics and artificial intelligence. This requires making data accessible across the ecosystem to create solutions for DoD problems. CDAO is taking an experimentation-based approach to determine what works.
• To prioritize its efforts, the DoD has crafted a hierarchy of needs that starts with data availability but also considers the character and quality of data—all of which are foundational steps for the application of analytics or AI algorithms. Data scientists play a critical translation role between mission needs and data systems.

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Source: Defense and Aerospace Report