Barry Smallwood
President of Emerging Markets Group, Akima
One of Barry Smallwood’s most significant achievements is working to ensure Akima’s customers are not only technically ready for AI adoption, but culturally ready as well. Akima worked closely with a major government agency to integrate AI into its customer relationship strategies, with a focus on technically sound solutions, enabled by a human-centric implementation strategy. Akima empowers customers to adopt AI seamlessly by providing organizational change management expertise, which significantly improves their ability to glean value from their stakeholder interactions.
Smallwood advocates for a responsible and holistic approach to adopting new technologies at Akima, emphasizing the importance of leading by example and adhering to the principles the company promotes. Akima maintains a research and development environment that values experimentation and views failures as learning opportunities.
Additionally, the company focuses on developing practical, real-world applications, ensuring its solutions are technically sound and useful. This approach helps Akima build trust and demonstrate the real-world impact of AI.
Why Watch
Akima is a leader in AI research, particularly in creating effective use cases for emergency management, training and mission exercises. The company’s main objective is to improve real-time situational awareness, decision-making and response strategies. By developing and refining AI applications, Akima is setting the stage for future advancements that will boost efficiency and safety in these critical areas.
A current focus is on developing realistic, AI-driven training simulations, powered by advanced machine learning algorithms, that adjust in real-time based on operator performance to provide a dynamic, personalized experience. The human-centric approach drives everything the company does, and its biggest research focus has been on explainable AI, particularly for high-stakes environments. By ensuring AI decision-making processes are transparent and understandable, human-AI collaboration and reliability are enhanced.
“The most important thing to consider when developing AI solutions is the adoption by those that the technology is intended to serve,” Smallwood said. “If the solutions are technically sound but it does not yield a meaningful, positive experience for the users, what’s the point of deploying them? The human-centric approach is the heartbeat behind our work, and it enables the transformative power of AI to continue moving us forward in practical, impactful ways.”
Fun fact: Smallwood’s lifelong fascination with the sky and outer space inspired him to earn his pilot’s license.