Kathleen Featheringham
Vice President of Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning – Federal, Maximus
A little more than a year after joining Maximus, Kathleen Featheringham’s impact has been felt across the company’s federal business as her experience coincided with an explosion of interest in the technology.
“For years, Maximus has been a leader in federal technology, particularly when it came to utilizing emerging technologies like AI and machine learning,” she said. “We are at an extraordinary convergence for technology, and federal agencies are seeking help from industry partners to find the best ways to implement AI to realize its full potential.”
Featheringham joined Maximus with nearly two decades of experience working with federal agencies on large-scale technology projects, and her first priority was to establish a refined AI strategy to expand upon the company’s robust offerings.
“We’ve reached the stage where we cannot do AI for the sake of AI,” she said. “Maximus had unique experience with AI, so my goal was how to focus our efforts on how to integrate AI into operations and workflows. The goal is to identify the best ways for agencies to utilize AI to maximize the investment in the technology.”
Why Watch
As Featheringham and Maximus look ahead through 2024 and beyond, the emphasis is on implementing AI technologies that allow their human counterparts to focus on what they excel at ⏤ critical thinking.
“There’s been a lot of conjecture about how AI will impact our daily work, but it’s important to remember the goal of AI is to improve how humans conduct their jobs,” she said. “We can integrate AI to make workflows and processes better, or to quickly analyze information and data, but there still needs to be a human being at the other end to provide that critical thinking to ensure AI is being used responsibly.”
The notion of “responsible AI” is a popular one, as agencies such as Department of Homeland Security have issued their own guidance and guidelines on how AI should be used moving forward.
“At Maximus, we’re really pushing hard into the responsible operationalization of AI, which means adaptive and continuous modernization,” Featheringham said. “The best way I can describe it is, we have to modernize the plane as we’re flying it. How agencies approach technology is fundamentally changing, and AI is at the leading edge of this evolution.”