Booz Allen Bets Big on Artificial Intelligence.

• Author: Magnuson, Stew
• Position: News Briefs

The boom in artificial intelligence and big data science has left many companies scrambling to find expertise in these burgeoning fields and competing over a small pool of talent.

Consulting giant Booz Allen Hamilton in partnership with NVIDIA--a leading manufacturer of graphic processing units widely used in AI--have teamed up to offer a series of courses on AI to help clients develop talent within their own ranks.

Booz Allen is also offering AI programming classes to thousands of its own employees in order to boost its own expertise, one executive told National Defense.

During Booz Allen's first quarter fiscal year 2019 earnings call, CEO Horacio Rozanski said the company was making big investments in artificial intelligence.

"As we look at procurements in general, especially coming out of DoD, it's clear that artificial intelligence is an area of focus and an area of investment," he said. Additionally, there are now clear funding streams for such endeavors, he noted.

The strategy has paid off with a major contract to develop new machine learning techniques for the government. The program--known as enterprise machine learning analytics and persistent services, or...