In response to questions from DefenseScoop on Wednesday, a CDAO spokesperson confirmed for the first time publicly that Pikar “has been hand-selected by the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Hon. Radha Plumb to serve as her Senior Advisor and lead a strategic review of [Department of Defense-wide] acquisition policy and framework gaps.” 

“[Pikar’s] new role with A&S begins tomorrow, Feb. 1,” the spokesperson said.

A Pentagon spokesperson later suggested that Pikar wasn’t tapped to lead an acquisition review.

“The CDAO submitted a statement that did not accurately describe the role in which Ms. Pikar will transition to at A&S. While the details of her role and portfolio will evolve in the coming months, she was hired to serve as a senior advisor where she will support strategic initiatives identified by DUSD Plumb,” Cmdr. Tim Gorman told DefenseScoop in an email.

The Pentagon’s CDAO chief Craig Martell and his team have identified Bonnie Evangelista, a procurement expert and the office’s Tradewinds execution lead, to serve as the acting DCDAO for acquisitions upon Pikar’s departure.

“In the coming weeks, we will actively engage in the search for [Pikar’s] successor for the Acquisition Directorate. Our commitment is to identify a candidate who possesses the right blend of skills, experience, and leadership qualities to seamlessly continue the essential work that has been initiated,” the CDAO spokesperson said.

“We understand the significance of this transition and its impact on our mission. Our goal is to ensure a smooth and effective handover, minimizing disruptions and maintaining the positive momentum we have built together,” they added — also noting that Evangelista’s “work on Tradewinds has set a foundation for acquisition innovation in the DOD.”

A member of the Senior Executive Service (SES), Pikar was among nearly a dozen leaders who joined the CDAO around the time it achieved full operating capability in the summer of 2022. 

Since then, she’s overseen all the nascent office’s procurement of data, analytics, and AI-related capabilities. She also operated as the “decision and approval authority for all CDAO research, development, and acquisition activities,” according to her official bio.

“Over the last five years, Sharothi served as the inaugural acquisition executive for the U.S. Cyber Command and then the same for CDAO. In CDAO, [Pikar] built an incredible acquisition team, established essential program oversight, provided acquisition guidance and direction on high impact programs, increased transparency, and partnerships with industry, and executed more agile and rapid contracting approaches,” the spokesperson said.

Pikar’s departure follows a slew of other CDAO deputies who opted to leave in recent months, including digital services guru Katie Savage and algorithmic warfare expert Joe Larson.

Her move comes as the office’s leaders prepare to host a massive AI summit next month and continue to work to bolster workplace morale after an internal review revealed that employees are deeply dissatisfied with how the CDAO is being run.

In response to DefenseScoop’s questions, the CDAO spokesperson also stated that upon Pikar’s exit, the office now “has three SES billets that are currently vacant, which we are looking to fill soon.”  

That means Martell and Deputy CDAO Margaret Palmieri are currently the only two officials within the hub with SES status.

“We continue to focus on the essential work in the CDAO to ensure we deliver vital capabilities to the joint force,” the spokesperson said. 

Updated on Feb. 6, 2024, at 5:35 PM: This story has been updated to include comment from Pentagon spokesperson Cmdr. Tim Gorman, who said in a Feb. 6 email that a CDAO statement provided to DefenseScoop inaccurately described the role that Sharothi Pikar is transitioning to in the A&S office.

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This news comes nearly six months after the Department of Defense launched a major organizational restructure to place a number of technology-driving components under this newly established office, with the ultimate aim to better scale digital and Al-enabled capabilities across its massive enterprise.

“Following a multi-step process from [initial operating capability] to FOC the CDAO has fully merged and integrated the former component organizations of Advana, Chief Data Officer, Defense Digital Service, and Joint Artificial Intelligence Center. Legacy component names will no longer be recognized or used unless attributed to a product or capability specific to the department,” according to a statement from CDAO’s spokesperson.

New hires include: 

• Chief Digital and AI Officer – Craig Martell
• Deputy CDAO – Margaret Palmieri
• DCDAO for Acquisition – Sharothi Pikar
• DCDAO for Policy, Strategy and Governance – Clark Cully
• DCDAO for Enterprise Platforms and Business Optimization – Greg Little
• DCDAO for Algorithmic Warfare – Joe Larson
• DCDAO for Digital Services – Katie (Olson) Savage
• Chief Operating Officer – Dan Folliard
• Chief Technology Officer – Bill Streilein
• Chief of AI Assurance – Jane Pinelis

Diane Staheli was also recently tapped to lead the CDAO’s Responsible AI (RAI) Division.

Several of these officials have already made waves within DOD, including founder and former director of the Navy’s digital warfare office Margaret Palmieri, and Joe Larson, who previously served as deputy chief for the Pentagon’s Project Maven.

In these new roles at the CDAO, the officials will help steer the Pentagon’s strategy development and policy formulation for associated solutions; enable data access and AI adoption within appropriate institutional processes; establish a strong digital infrastructure and services to support military and department components’ AI- and digital-driven deployments, and more.

The CDAO is targeting October 1 for the full administrative alignment of personnel and resources, the spokesperson told FedScoop.

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Protecting the government’s intellectual property is one example of an area where improvements have been made, according to Lt. Gen. Michael Groen.

In the past “lots of vendors started to come on board and …  [were] charging us a lot of money for things that we, you know, that we didn’t need to be paying for,” he said during a virtual conference hosted by C4ISRNET.  

“We have less, but still some, you know, folks in the department who are just giving government data away, right, and then buying it back from a vendor,” he said. “Hey, we’re not doing that shit anymore, right. Like government intellectual property, we know how to protect that … and we’re teaching everybody how to protect that so that we get the benefit.”

Additionally, the JAIC has “pulled together” a number of different contract vehicles such as blanket purchase agreements or other transaction authority agreements (OTAs) where a consortium of vendors bid on projects, he noted.

In the past, the JAIC was “cranking through these investment vehicles” and then working closely with Army Contracting Command to actually implement them.

Now, the JAIC is “very close” to having the ability to implement these contracting vehicles on its own without the assistance of other agencies, he noted.

“We’ve got lots of tools now that are in place,” he said.

OTAs, which are designed to cut through bureaucratic red tape and help the Pentagon pursue new technologies faster, have helped connect the DOD with nontraditional vendors.

“That also helped us open up our environment to small vendors. So, a small vendor with, you know, maybe one small capability … that meets a need that we have in the department. We have the ability now to not just work with big primes, but also work with small companies that maybe don’t have a lot of experience working with the Department of Defense and can’t afford, you know, the overhead that it takes to get into the defense business,” Groen said.

He continued: “We’ve tried to make it really much easier for people with good ideas and good capabilities — small or large companies — to work with us and help us build capabilities. And that’s actually going really, really well.”

In December, the position of chief digital and artificial intelligence officer (CDAO) was created to oversee the JAIC, Defense Digital Service and the Pentagon’s chief data office. In March, the DOD announced the appointment of Sharothi Pikar as deputy chief CDAO for acquisitions. Pikar will oversee the development, acquisition and procurement of capabilities with the department’s industry and academic partners.

“As our acquisition executive gets on board and starts to function in that capacity, we’re going to be able to execute that, you know, even better. And we’ll be able to do it ourselves … with Congress’ approval,” Groen said.

Contracting will be critical as the Pentagon moves to integrate its AI capabilities.

Just a few years ago when the JAIC was first stood up, “we were building sort of demonstration AI projects just to illuminate right across the department, ‘Hey, this is what AI kind of looks like,’” Groen said.

In three years, the Pentagon has moved from AI “discovery” to AI adoption to now focusing on AI integration, he said.

“Now we’re thinking about with every service having, you know, a fairly robust AI capability … that’s under construction,” Groen said.

Each of the services will be pursuing a variety of AI efforts, and they may involve hundreds of projects “whether those are, you know, pure AI plays or if it’s AI integrated into a system or a … platform architecture,” he said.

The DOD needs to be able to “federate capabilities across the enterprise,” the JAIC chief said. To do that, operational data sources will need to cataloged and available so that they can be “stitched” into algorithms.

For example, if somebody in the Navy builds a good AI capability, another DOD agency or component could tap into that catalog and tune it for a different application.

“We need to have that kind of environment where we can share data readily and we can share a platform environment readily. That gives us resilience and … we’d be competitive with anybody when we are operating at that scale,” Groen said.

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