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We look forward to this evening's discussion and to continuing the conversation with all of you. Please come back and engage with us here at the Hopkins Bloomberg Center soon. It's now my pleasure to introduce our first speakers of the evening. Moderating the conversation is Tammy Hadad, founder of the Washington AI Network. Tammy is going to be joined by Justin Finelli, the chief technology officer of the United States Navy, and Hopkins' own Christopher Watkins, the chief mission engineering and integration officer at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. Please welcome them for the first portion of tonight's program.
Hi everyone, how are you doing? Welcome to the Washington AI Network podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Center.
I'm Tammy Hadad, the founder of the Washington AI Network, and we begin today's program with Christopher Watkins and Justin Finelli. Christopher is the chief mission engineering and integration officer at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. I already tried to get a tour from him. Christopher is a Navy veteran now focused on naval defense technology, autonomous underwater vehicles, bridging research and strategic implication for national security. And Justin Finelli is the chief technology officer for the United States Navy. Justin is at the center of innovation at the Pentagon. Central to Justin's role is unleashing public-private partnerships to ensure our warfighters have the latest technology. Let's hear it for them.
First of all, thank you so much for your service. And I want to start with you, Justin, if that's okay. When a sailor commander is in a time-critical situation, what does successful AI look like?
Wow. Okay, that's tough, right? That was a good question, don't you think? Good question. Okay.
The only harder piece is walking in late.
Right. Exactly.
All right. So let's pan out a little bit. As it relates to what we're doing right now and how we're viewing technology and where AI fits and doesn't, we're at a moment where, number one, a lot of capabilities have become mature, but the recognition, specifically within the department, that the cognizance of our sailors and marines who want faster decision loops, who want more time saved, who want to be able to get back to the job or to have connections to more data sources or to know the signal through the noise, that recognition is the best I've ever seen it. And the technology tipping point, those continue, but right now the craving for these capabilities has allowed us to work with individuals who are ready to pull things forward. And so what it looks like is we compare the baseline of how they work right now in exercises and challenges and pilots to how much better it can be. And there are places where it's not linearly better, it's exponentially better. So what it looks like is time on mission, increased lethality, increased survivability, and increased power projection to the point that we are deterring and don't have to do things that we don't want to do.
Well, that's incredible. Let's hear it for him. That's amazing. So Chris, when you were serving as a commander in submarines, don't you wish you had all that technology?
Well, and at APL, you're focused on all this, too. So tell us from your point of view where things are.
Okay. So to pile on to what Justin said, when we're thinking about deploying artificial intelligence on platforms, think about cognitive load of the operators, right? They are having to contend with tremendous amounts of sensor information and it's really about decision advantage at the end of the day. Who can make the best decision fastest? This is where artificial intelligence deployed at the edge on our platforms is extraordinarily important. The other piece I want to bring up is trust. Okay, so how do you trust what the algorithms are providing to you? There's a variety of different technologies that help with that. One is explainable AI. So AI that mimics the thought processes of a human operator. So take a submarine, a sonar operator, Jonesy from Hunt for Red October, right?
I told him I was going to ask, but who loved that movie, The Hunt for Red October? That was his life. How amazing.
So what the algorithms can do is present evidence actually as to why it's saying what it's saying. It's calling this particular contact this particular contact, and then it presents that information to the operator so they can trust and promote it in the system.
Okay. But I have to ask you, how do you educate all of these, all the warfighters, all the technologists, all the people in the office on how to use this technology because it's happening all in real time. All these changes are taking place. Justin, do you want to start?
Yeah. Well, so what Chris just laid out is the technology is good. It's about the human-machine teaming to result in outcomes. So we're spending money, but I guess different from in the past, we are trying to invest in our capabilities and our people to make sure that you can show night and day how much more effective this is. So like the difference between cognitive load before and after. Okay. What that actually looks like is on a ship, we have a common operating picture and instead of that being a mishmash of a handful of systems, we have a current real-time system that allows them to make decisions faster. That reduces the time that they're swivel-sharing. That reduces the time that...
Oh, this is, who here was in the military?
There you go. Raise your hands higher. Come on. Thank you. Who is in the Navy? Jonathan Clifford, second row. There you go.
All right. So then they know this better.
Swivel chair. Did you swivel chair? Oh, he did.
And so swivel chair is why there are axes on a chair is because we have so many disconnected systems historically that you have to actually turn not just your neck but your whole body to get to the different systems. What we've done recently is we've integrated that in such a significant way that people can actually get back to the job, right? Like we are actually seeing both a ship afloat and ashore a difference in how they operate because integration with our partners is a priority.
Wow. Did you swivel chair too?
It's tighter. It's tighter on a submarine. It's a little, it's not, it's called something different. So again, but you're dealing with all kinds of new technology and in your teaching here at Johns Hopkins, right? You've got the partnerships of these, not just Johns Hopkins, but research universities all around the United States and you've got companies and then you've also got government. And so this is again educating a lot of folks at the same time. And particular to Hopkins, you're trying to advance everything by years. How are you doing it?
Yeah. So at the Applied Physics Lab, we have, I'd say, a cadre of a few hundred folks that do live and breathe the application of artificial intelligence in the mission space and then also into our back office type operations as well to make efficiencies in how we execute on the organization. Then we have a variety of training programs throughout the workforce to make sure that the entire workforce is savvy in using this. How can we execute our jobs better? How can we find new and interesting applications of this technology in our mission space and how can we deliver capabilities much faster? And then additionally, we partner with portions of the government. We've done something with the Naval Sea Systems Command on taking what we have learned and more broadly educating our government partners as well.
All right. So a little later, we're going to talk to Scott Kupor who started US Tech Force. First of all, Justin, I'll start with you. What is your take on that? Is that going to help you build capability? How are you looking at it?
Yeah. Will more talent in our workforce help us to go faster? Yes. So this is a knowledge work game, right? Something interesting here is if you're doing manual labor, you might get incrementally or linearly like a little bit faster. Knowledge work is totally different. So we had kind of version zero of Tech Force in the Noble Reach cohort that we've been hosting for the last year and we have 23-year-olds who are just moving so they're running laps because they understand AI. They are in a hands-on role within the government with problems that are so big and hard that they're stimulated. Actually, there's a story. One of them, I was walking back from a meeting with a three-star. We have a 23-year-old meeting with a three-star because he's so savvy. And he said, when I started, I was playing with a Rubik's cube and you told me, I'm glad you did that. Your problems are about to get harder. And he said, I thought to myself, harder than a Rubik's cube? And he said, they are so much bigger and more satisfying than I could have imagined. If we can get more people like that in this cause right now, it's an exponential impact.
And Chris, that's my point about serving, you know, being in public service, right? Where you have the opportunity to make a difference. I mean, there's many ways to make a difference, but make a difference for the public good, right? So Tech Force and the Noble Reach Foundation are saying to young people like many in the room, hey, why don't you come into government first and Tech Force is pulling that all together. What do you think about it?
Absolutely. And I would say start even earlier, right? Go into the elementary schools, the middle schools, STEM education, but bring specific AI type modules in there. So I think the earlier you get to people and you kind of give them an understanding what the future's going to look like and how they could apply their knowledge and their skills in the public good, I think it's a very powerful combination.
I want to riff on like, so this is a game where you're learning by doing, right? And so what we've started to do with some of the talent we have, data science at C, we did our first hackathon underway recently. If you are closer to the problem and closer to the people with the problems, you're going to learn more. You're going to figure out what applications are there. And so this is as much as it's exciting to see these advances, the proximity to the problems and the reps is the way that we win this game together.
What do you think the biggest opportunities are for Tech Force?
I think that essentially in the national security struggles that we're in right now, the Tech Force could be an absolutely foundational capability to build that workforce of the future. So getting the people the experience at the problems right at the edge where they really matter and really letting AI really become part of the ecosystem and not just an interesting technology but something that is part and parcel to how we do business and how we fight as a nation in the future.
And what about the intelligence community when you're talking about AI? We talked a little bit about it, trust. How does the intelligence community deal with the trust issues? Oh, let's hear what they have to say. That was a pause. Work on this a little bit.
Yes. So let's, I want to go to first principles here because AI is a general purpose technology, the other GPT, right? And the idea of allowing it to reshape the way that we do some things. Why did we get into government? Because you get to serve the people, right? You think that we can be so much better than we are right now. We want to be more efficient. We are being more efficient. How much better can this be? And so kind of independent of the domain, it's what is the baseline and then how can we beat that baseline. From an intelligence perspective, you know, like within our intelligence directorate in Navy, how do we use AI to save time? There's a lot of manual labor. And so one of our programs was saying, hey, I went to a watch floor at midnight and I said, oh, here are the two senior officers who are doing manual watch. How much faster could you do your job if this was infused with AI? Okay. And then they're just getting notified of anomalies. People were actually afraid the first time. They were like, they're not going to like you. You're going to take their job away. I went and I said, is this okay? And they said, do you mean me focusing on the mission? Right? Like me focusing on the signal and getting rid of the noise and still being able to go back and see where anomaly detections tell me that these are, you know, like true positives. Yes, we want that. And so there are any number of things that we can do, but we have to do that A/B testing along the way so that we know what to scale and what isn't ready for prime time.
I want to hear about autonomous underwater vehicles, but let's first talk about robots. What's, I just got back from CES. Anyone else at CES? It was, oh, look at them. It was robot central there. What role will robots play, not just in the Navy, but in the military?
Well, I think robots are going to take over a lot of the dull, dirty, and dangerous jobs that people do not really...
The ones that Justin had. He was clearly talking about himself with all that manual labor. Don't you think?
Yes. And I think it's a combination not only of the dexterity of the machines, what type of, how they can actually manipulate the world around them, but how they view the world. So it's machine perception, right? And that goes directly into artificial intelligence, machine learning types interpretation of the sensor data that they're getting. So if you could think of a future robot with far different sensors than what a human does. It doesn't have to replicate a human, but how does it make sense of that information and how does it execute those types of activities? So I think the robotic world can really completely revolutionize the way we build and operate systems.
Okay, let's talk about that, goes right into underwater autonomous vehicles. Can you talk about what you guys are working on and what you see in the future?
Yes. So unmanned undersea vehicles are proliferating around the world. It's not just the United States working in this area. When you think about the totality of the ocean, we operate in a very small part of it and we understand a very small part of it. Right? So the trade space for understanding, getting intelligence in those areas, understanding what adversaries are doing and covering down and monitoring what other activities other nations are doing is just a tremendous trade space. Unmanned undersea vehicles will help augment the size of the sensing force that we have. It can't just be manned submarines running around there covering down on all of the space.
Are you working on any of that?
Yeah. So this is a force multiplier, right? And so we just recently stood up a, everyone who has been remotely close to the Department of War knows about a program of record. This is the desired end state if you're working with the government. It is stovepiped and slow. And so we've shifted to portfolios and our first portfolio that we stood up was called RAZ, robotic and autonomous systems. And so how do we make sure that we're evaluating with trade space the highest impact per dollar robots, autonomous vehicles, surface vehicles, UUVs across the board. Where is your best bang for the buck? And so again, imagine a scenario where people have spent their entire career just building something and now we're saying, hey, we're going to let you buy. We're going to let you work with private sector and we're going to augment largely either manual or piecemeal solutions with a web of capability. We need more talent to make those decisions go faster. But we have an awesome set of partners on the private sector side. We have, the government is in this way smaller than it's ever been. We're working with DHS and Coast Guard. We're working with Department of Transport, like the amount of synergies for us to figure out what works, test, scale, kill otherwise in terms of the capability maturity process that's going. So are we working in that space? Yes. Do we want that in manufacturing so that we can go faster? Yes. Do we want that just about anywhere? But we're going to prioritize based on impact.
So Johns Hopkins is a legendary research, not just university, but foundational research like no other place, right? Not to promote Johns Hopkins. Let's hear it for them. Thank you. A little louder. Sell's in the front row. Thank you very much. The Energy Department, the Trump administration announced the Genesis program bringing the work of the national labs together and it just makes me wonder with APL, are you working with other universities? I know we have folks from other universities here in the room. How do you work together and coordinate this in real time?
Yes. So we have cooperative agreements with a number of other research organizations and it kind of spans the portfolio that Johns Hopkins APL is involved in and that goes essentially from the seabed to space essentially. And in fact, you're going to have a space talk here coming up at...
I was going to promote Space Force next week. Mark your bingo cards.
And we'll be talking specifically to what's going on in that domain. So we have cooperative research agreements both with the government and amongst ourselves as educational institutions. And we also have a variety of sabbatical and other types of education programs that allow us to work across organizations.
And in all your free time, Justin, you also teach at Georgetown University. That's here for Georgetown across the street, right across the way.
They host events here too.
Yes, they host events here too. That's right. We love them. All the universities. So, how are you working with universities to drive AI adoption other than coming to programs like this and really explaining actually how you're changing things or trying to change things?
So the course I got this semester was a first-time run. It was software-defined warfare. It was waitlisted. I was really impressed with how kind of hungry students were for this. And from a research perspective, from a student perspective, I think people are hungry. What we're looking for is a little bit less science fair and more translation. We want to make sure, like you said at the beginning, that we're getting solutions, better capability to our sailors and marines faster. And so that means at the lab level, at the university level, at the commercial level, as much as we can usher in what's highest impact, that's why we serve. And that's frankly why we need Tech Force to bring in more talent so that we can surge the best capabilities.
That sounds terrific. I want to thank you both. Please join me in thanking them. Thanks so much. And we're going to let you guys go. And if you guys could please direct your attention to the screen.
Want to help shape the next generation of changemakers? The Noble Reach Scholars program launches top STEM and business grads into mission-driven roles serving the nation. They're ready to make an immediate impact on behalf of the American people. And you can be a part of it. When you become part of our community, you're not just joining a network. You're lending your name and wisdom to a testing ground catalyzing exceptional talent. When you connect with the best and brightest of the next generation, you build your legacy among tomorrow's emerging leaders. Join a bipartisan group of visionary leaders from federal, state, and local government and industry by becoming a speaker and mentor. Your expertise can illuminate their journey and leave your mark on tomorrow's innovators. Thank you to all of our speakers for your support and dedication to our mission.
Ladies and gentlemen, please join me to discuss the new US Tech Force. Join me in welcoming Scott Kupor, director of the White House Office of Personnel Management, and Arun Gupta, CEO of the Noble Reach Foundation. Thank you both for being here.
Thank you so much. So, Scott,
Let me be the last to welcome you to Washington. We're so glad you're here. As a longtime Silicon Valley leader, you spent decades shaping how technology companies are built and scaled. You've brought that experience to Washington launching the government initiative called US Tech Force designed to recruit the best technologists into government service at a time when the influx of new technology is outpacing the speed of government. Now more than ever government needs modern technical expertise and I think most of the folks here agree, right?
The friendliest crowd I've seen in a long time. I know we liquor them up before. That's my secret.
We're so pleased to have you here. Thank you so much, Arun. It's so great to have you back. Arun Gupta, CEO of the Noble Reach Foundation. Our neighbor, our friend who two and a half years ago, again, VC. He left that industry to come and be with us and bring more tech scholars into government. The Noble Reach Scholars Program. We have some here. Where are the scholars? Raise your hands. You got three. There you go. Thank you guys so much for coming. By the way, Scott, this program is so good.
I met someone at their last event and guess where she was going? Hawaii. These are good jobs, folks, in government. That's for sure. But Scott, let's come. So, why Tech Force and why now?
Yeah. So, first of all, thank you for having me and thank you Arun for your partnership. It's been fantastic. So, look, to me, what we're trying to solve are a couple of challenges that I think we have in government. One is obvious. What you talked about is, look, the pace of technology is just going to continue to accelerate and, you know, the government is, I would say, woefully underprepared from a talent perspective. You heard it from, you know, my colleagues who were here before. So number one is we just have, we have to solve like a talent gap problem there. The other thing we're trying to solve with Tech Force is we have a terrible, like, age demographic problem in government. So only 7% of the workforce in government is under the age of 30 and about 44% of the workforce is over the age of 50. So if we do nothing, basically, we have a pending problem where we have a ton of people retiring over the next five or 10 years and we've done absolutely nothing to actually, like, replenish the pipeline. So to us, like, this is the perfect opportunity, which is can we fill a talent gap in the technology area and can we also start to solve what we call the early career problem in government. So collectively, I think we can tackle those two problems with Tech Force.
Okay. So it's been three weeks, I think, since you announced the program. What's been the response?
It's been phenomenal, like way better than expected. And again, we've had fantastic partners to go to market with. So, you know, what I think we did well and uniquely is obviously we teamed up, of course, with the Arun team, but then we also included about 30 private sector companies. Um, you know, all of us...
What are they going to do?
So, they're going to do a bunch of stuff. So, let me take a step back. So, what we really want to demonstrate in this program is if you're an early career person, you don't need to make a 40-year decision as to whether you're going to be in government or be in the private sector. What my hope is over time, my personal view is I think it would be healthy both for the government and for the private sector if we had more people who come in and out, quite frankly. And I know the ethics lawyers hate me when I say this, but, like, I think we can deal with the ethics issues. I'm not worried about that. To me, the bigger opportunity is what's the upside of having that mix. So the reason why we want to partner with the private companies is I want to demonstrate that, look, if you do great work in government and you ultimately decide you want to be in the private sector and not in government, then your skill set is transferable to the private sector. So among other things, they're going to do, number one is they're going to contribute managers to help us kind of, you know, staff the program. Two is they're going to help us in terms of the programmatic elements of it. So speaker series, training, certifications, all kinds of other stuff. And then probably most significantly in my mind is we're going to run a job fair at the end of this two-year period that will include both government employers and private sector employers. And, you know, my hope and expectation is if we do a good job on the front end of screening these folks and we do a good job of training them while they're in government, they're going to be, you know, eminently qualified to, like, get whatever private sector jobs if that's what they want to do or they'll get government jobs. But we want to create this optionality and this idea that there can be a fluid career track, particularly for early career folks.
So Arun, you've been doing this at Noble Reach Foundation for the last two and a half years. What advice have you given Scott on how to engage the community?
Look, with Scott, you know, we've been fortunate to have a partner where we were very aligned on the outcomes that we're driving for, right? When we started Noble Reach, it was very much around the notion of, like, how do we combine personal ambition with civic responsibility? We've created a narrative where people have, or students especially, think about doing either-or. So, do I go in the public sector or do I go in the private sector? But we haven't created the interdependencies, the bridges to have them feel like they can do both. And so a lot of what we've talked about from what we've seen at Noble Reach has really been around one narrative and shaping the narrative, right? What we talk about when we talk to students about coming into the program at Noble Reach and likewise with Tech Force is to think of themselves as ultimately becoming dual public-private sector citizens. And so where they have an understanding of how both sectors work, how they have an understanding of the language of both, the networks of both, and that will enhance their career opportunities. Because I think it's important for them to see that the opportunities get expanded and the aperture of that expands accordingly.
I think second, you know, what we're also seeing is we talk about this not in terms of careers but in terms of experiences, right? It used to be that government was selling careers for 30 years. And what we've been saying at Noble Reach is, like, come for a year or two, and our scholars represent this. Come learn and see what's going on here. You may decide you want to stay, which is great. You may decide you leave, but we celebrate both options because even if they leave, we want them to be ambassadors for understanding what public service is about and staying connected to public service. And they, as Scott's saying, they may want to come back.
And that's an important piece of it. And is it, Scott, are you looking for graduates? Are you looking for graduate students with graduate degrees? People that have worked in industry a couple years? How are you looking at it?
Okay. So we are looking for people who have the right skill set. So one of the big initiatives also that you know that probably the Trump administration is doing and OPM is supporting is what we call merit hiring. And I know that sounds like motherhood and apple pie because, of course, we all want to do merit hiring. One of the challenges, though, in federal government, some people may not know, has been historically we have done kind of self-attestation of skills as a way to hire people. So we have not done assessments to figure out, like, do they actually have merit. The other thing we've done is we use a lot of proxies in government for skills. So almost every job in government has a college degree requirement or it has minimum tenure requirements. And look, there are many jobs for which a college degree might actually be helpful. But my general view in the world is, look, you want to hire people against the actual skills you need and then you want to assess them for those skills. And quite frankly, you know, if somebody is fantastic and they don't have a college degree but they can perform at the level we need them, then, you know, God bless them, like, we should take them, basically. So we're trying to basically eliminate barriers to things that are kind of proxies for merit. So, you know, my favorite example, which, you know, if you'll give me 30 more seconds, I'll give you, is, you know, there was an employee, an engineer who's working for DOGE, and I won't mention his name because it's a very colorful, it was a very colorful nickname, which many of you probably know. So some of you can figure it out. But among the other complaints that people had of him, there was an article, I think, in The Washington Post, and they quoted somebody from the administration who said, "We never would have hired this guy because he didn't have a college degree and he didn't have 10 years' worth of work experience." And I literally wanted to kind of pull my hair out when I heard that because I was like, to me, like, that's exactly the opposite culture that, at least from my perspective, we want to create, which is I want to create a culture where, look, if somebody is fantastic and they're awesome and they can do stuff, then let's get them in here and let's level them appropriately for that. And so much of the way the kind of federal compensation and federal system works is things are measured on proxies for success as opposed to actual success. So Tech Force, one of the things we're doing here is, look, we're not doing that. So in theory, so the short answer to your question is, look, you don't need to have a degree at Tech Force. If you have one, that's awesome, but that's not a requirement for the job. The requirement for the job is, can you actually perform the skills that we need you to perform? And we want to level people appropriately for that.
And how many applications, I say applications, but how many, I know you've gotten like 35,000 responses.
I'm probably outdated. My partner, Kevin, is in the audience here. He can help you, but, like, we're, like, yeah, north of 35,000 people who've said, like, "This is cool. This is awesome." And then, you know, we're working through our funnel now of, like, okay, how many of those people will give us a resume? How many people do the application? So that's kind of all live right now. The application is still open, so I don't want to bias people from doing it, but I would say, like, we're, from my perspective, like, the interest is phenomenal. And, look, we're going to do everything we can to make this successful. A thousand is our initial target. But my aspirations for this thing is, look, we should be doing 5,000, we should be doing 10,000. And then Arun and I were talking about this, you know, in the other room, like, I want to then kind of break off verticals and say, okay, maybe there is a Tech Force-like thing for HR functions or for financial analyst functions.
Well, that's what I wanted to ask you. Are you targeting different areas?
Yes. Yes. So, look, Tech Force is the first instantiation of this, right? And it's critically important. But, look, tech is not the only skill set that government needs and it's not the only area where government has an early career deficit, basically. So one of the things that we're doing at OPM for the first time is we actually required every agency to submit their full annual headcount plan to us, which, again, coming from the private sector, sounds crazy that we haven't done this before, but this has never been done. And one of the benefits of that now is we have a pan-government view of what is everybody hiring. And so we can say, great, you know what, it turns out there are 10,000 new HR positions that are being hired across government. And one of the things that we want OPM to do is we should create a program around that and let's go target early career folks. Let's do the marketing, the outreach. Let's get a different set of private sector companies to partner with us on that and create a similar program like Tech Force and then just do that across verticals. So over time what we can solve is we can solve the early career problem. We can increase the efficiency of hiring and we can improve the applicant experience because in the perfect world, like, I want anybody who's interested in federal government who has a certain skill set to say, okay, the government needs my skill set. I don't need to know is it at Department of War, is it Department of Energy. I just need to know, like, the government needs me as an HR professional. And then we'll screen them and then we will basically submit their name to 10 different agencies and say, you know what, like, knock yourselves out, go compete for this applicant and, you know, may the best person win, basically. So this is both an important objective of getting more tech people in government, but it's also an experiment for us on how do we do centralized hiring in a way that scales across government.
And just to add to what Scott's saying, the reason from our experience this is so important is that the way we were having to go places, go agency to agency, right? And ask folks, do you need talent? What do you need? And things of that sort. To actually have a one place to go to, because our issue when people would ask us about our program was, how are you going to convince people to do this? The issue was actually getting the placements on the government side. You know, we would have, you know, we had over 3,000 people apply, you know, for 30 placements. But with someone like what Scott's doing now with the program, that opens up the placement window and that makes it easier for us to start filling these spots in a more meaningful way.
Yeah, this was one of, again, and I talked about this. This is one of the most important things that I learned when we were kind of setting up...
This program is, look, as you know, there's nothing we're doing here that's rocket science, right? Okay. So, you know, there have been lots of programs to, you know, recruit people into government over time, but I think these things fail for a lot of reasons. One of the areas they failed was people didn't aggregate demand appropriately across government. So, they would have the challenge, which, you know, Arun has done fantastically, which is he's got like a fantastic—he could place way more people than there are positions there. But the only reason he's doing—the only reason he's limited by that is because he's not sitting inside of government and, you know, hasn't done the work that our team has done, because it's understandable, of literally going agency by agency and saying like, this is an important priority, the administration says it's important, like show me your headcount plan where this is in there, right? And so that's a role that I think we can do that will be beneficial to Arun's organization as well, because we can help him expand his pipeline. And then again, as I said, like now that we have visibility across all these other areas, like we'll go surface the demand, and then obviously our job at OPM is, okay, can we build the top of the funnel and build the supply.
