Dave Vennergrund
Vice President for AI and Data Insights, GDIT
Dave Vennergrund’s most notable recent accomplishment involved collaborating with a highly skilled team from both inside and outside GDIT to select AI projects for production. To facilitate this, they conducted a detailed survey of federal leaders about deploying AI safely. The resulting research report, “AI in Full Bloom,” identifies barriers to scaling AI, such as data diversity and workforce readiness, and offers best practices for overcoming these challenges. This publication serves as a guide for agencies aiming to scale proofs and pilots into production.
Additionally, Vennergrund has been a strong advocate for the safe, secure and trustworthy use of AI across the industry, with a special focus on generative AI. He leads a biweekly generative AI meetup that shares insights, experiences and best practices for safely using this transformative technology. He also looks forward to supporting the NIST AI Safety Institute Consortium in defining science-based evaluation methods for large language models and generative AI.
“In one year, most of us will be positively impacted by AI in many ways,” he said. “In three years, AI will fundamentally alter our workday, for the better.
Why Watch
GDIT is focusing on integrating open-source models and cloud-native services into its solutions, using generative AI frameworks. The company is creating retrieval-augmented generative solutions to offer customized chat experiences to customers, using their specific domain data. Additionally, GDIT is advancing the development of a secure framework that safeguards data, models and inferences, ensuring its AI solutions maintain safety and protect rights.
Fun fact: Vennergrund is a weekend farmer and spends his time working on projects including milling lumber, rebuilding fences and bridges, weeding, cutting vines, cutting firewood, planting and picking up an endless supply of windfall branches.