Brian MacCarthy: Latent AI’s Capabilities Could Back Booz Allen’s Contract Work Around Machine Learning

Brian MacCarthy, a vice president and founder of the San Francisco-based tech scouting group at Booz Allen Hamilton (NYSE: BAH), said the investment in Latent AI will enable Booz Allen to integrate the startup’s capabilities into its contracts to help meet the demand of warfighters for machine learning services at the tactical edge, the Washington Business Journal reported Monday.

“The idea is: How could we get them in the hands of our clients?” McCarthy said in an interview. “How could we use Booz Allen contracts to look and find and vet them to get onto contract quickly? For us, kind of offsetting some our own R&D capabilities, we felt like this specific technology would fit within our larger AI and analytics strategic bets.”

He said he believes Latent AI could also move into internet of things and health care areas to help enhance capabilities in edge computing that could have potential benefits to the Department of Veterans Affairs and other federal agencies.

McCarthy noted that Booz Allen selected Latent AI out of a pool of 30 to 40 companies offering capabilities that could help the McLean, Virginia-based consulting firm deliver on some machine learning-related contracts with the Army.

“They were really best in breed,” he said of Latent AI. “It became fairly obvious very quickly that that was a capability that was needed for the mission set that we were doing the scouting, so we wanted to make sure we got that into the hands of the warfighter.”

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