Top AI Execs to Watch

Tiffanny Gates, Novetta

Tiffanny Gates is president and CEO of analytics technology firm Novetta, which serves nearly all government agencies related to defense and national security. Her career experience spans a range of leadership roles in the federal space at companies including Raytheon, Blackbird Technologies Inc. and Mantech International Corp. From 1995 to 2000, she served in the Navy as a cryptologic officer.

Why Watch: Gates is leading the way as Novetta’s partnership with Amazon Web Services continues to build from strength to strength.

“In the early days, we were one of the first to earn AWS Government Competency and this past May, Novetta achieved AWS Machine Learning competency, which still only stands at 18 total companies,” Gates said. “Then, in June, while attending AWS Public Sector, we launched one of our flagship products, Novetta Entity Analytics on the AWS marketplace platform. NEA provides customers with scalable entity resolution capabilities on top of high performance distributed computing architecture powered by tools such as AWS Elastic Map Reduce and Apache Spark.”

“As we head into the fall, we are particularly excited that AWS has invited us to take to the stage at AWS Re:Invent to showcase early capabilities from Novetta’s new Machine Learning Center of Excellence,” Gates added.

She’s also paying attention to logistical concerns customers sometimes have around cloud migration.

“Migrating massive data to the cloud, safely and swiftly, doesn’t have to be a headache,” she said. “We’ve heavily invested in migrating our data analytics capabilities to the cloud already, which means we can offer our tools to our customers with very little migration frustration. We’re staying one step ahead by exploring and adopting new cloud technologies before our customers ask for them, or sometimes, are even aware of them. The key to handling cybersecurity threats in the cloud is to ensure that data security and data migration are considered together, mitigating additional complexity and cost.”

Named by Washingtonian Magazine as a top 50 great place to work in 2017, Novetta focuses both on the workforce pipeline as well as ensuring more technical training and certifications for current staff.

“We increased our investment in our internship program, which quadrupled participation versus past years,” Gates said. “This incredible group of students focused on approaching current customer challenges from a new perspective. They brought great ideas and great energy to our offices up and down the coast.”

Over the next 12-18 months, Gates will join the board of the Alliance for Digital Innovation alongside other community members to help shape government IT modernization efforts through advocacy and thought leadership. She will also lead Novetta toward advances in applying machine learning and deep learning to drive down manual data processing times and increase higher-value insights.