Michael Foster, former head of solutions engineering at CrowdAI, was appointed as chief data officer of the U.S. Central Command.
The military branch is banking on Foster’s expertise in artificial intelligence model development, big data management and spatio-temporal analytics to reach its goal of becoming a data-centric organization, CENTCOM Commander Gen. Michael Erik Kurilla said Friday.
Foster’s 24-year career started in the Air Force as a commissioned officer. After 11 years, he joined the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency as an intelligence officer.
His experience in the private sector includes director roles at DigitalGlobe, now owned by Maxar Technologies (NYSE: MAXR). At DigitalGlobe, he led the GBDX government cloud platform team, while at Maxar, he was director of the emergent government solutions group.
“I am honored to be given the opportunity to serve with CENTCOM and contribute to their already impressive accomplishments,” Foster remarked. “I am excited by the challenges of developing data-centric solutions to enable warfighting across the CENTCOM region.”
