The finalists for WashingtonExec’s 2023 Pinnacle Awards were announced Sept. 25, and we’ll be highlighting some of them until the event takes place live, in-person Nov. 16.
Next is Richard Jacik, chief digital officer and senior vice president at Brillient Corp., and finalist in the Artificial Intelligence Executive of the Year, Private Company category. Here, he discusses proud organizational moments and safely breaking industry rules.
What are you most proud of having been a part of in your current organization?
I’m most proud of simply being able to keep up with a team of rockstar technologists, engineers, and researchers at Brillient, and occasionally, to lead them into new ideas and new ways of thinking about technology enablement. The past two years have been a whirlwind of R&D, invention, and in getting intelligent technologies into the hands of customers and delivery teams. Watching the team move from need to idea to prototype to production is like watching magic. I can safely say that in the past year we’ve deployed more mission-improving solutions, from full-on systems to AI-lets (small, service-based AI utilities), than I did in my prior five years of federal project delivery.
We’ve matured the organization into a full-fledged product and AI engineering team that collaborates with researchers from local universities and around the world and it’s a joy to watch that collaboration deliver both improved taxpayer ROI and radically improved citizen experience. And maybe the most exciting part is that this is part of an eco-system architecture ⏤ enabling best-of-breed point solutions to rapidly and easily coexist with our IP, resulting in a solution-set that is fast to deploy, easy to use, and ready to evolve as we embrace improved capabilities.
Which rules do you think you should break more as a government/industry leader?
This is a dangerous question! I don’t know if some tech execs think of it as a rule, certainly some buyers and sponsors of transformation projects do, but to the extent that perfection of technology is a goal, then it needs to be broken or abandoned. There’s a reason Hephaestus, the god of technology, walked with a pronounced limp ⏤ because tech at its best is still imperfect.
Over-engineering for perfection, waiting for the perfect technology, delaying significant improvements because you don’t yet have access to the perfect solution ⏤ these need to be viewed through a different lens; that even less-than-perfect solutions can transform the citizen experience for the better, (and coupled with change management) make employees better at their jobs. The best tech is only the best tech if it matches the situation; there’s no such thing as best as an abstract absolute.
I guess the corollary to that is that we need to be more judicious about mapping problems into a pre-existing solution space. Especially lately as industry seems to believe that a large language model must be the right answer to every conceivable problem ⏤ it’s not. Sometimes GOFAI (good old-fashioned AI) is better at solving a problem than this year’s version of LLMs, and sometimes “boring” declarative, and procedural code works better than GOFAI. I think the president’s executive order on AI is a great start at making sure we’re not misapplying technology in a way that’s detrimental to the American people.
By the way, for anyone who has ever dropped an item into the grocery bag at the wrong velocity and gotten stuck in self-checkout hell, Amanda Mull’s article in the Atlantic on the failed experiment of self-checkout is a great object lesson on the misplaced focus to apply technology rather than to improve customer experience.