Enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) software company C3 AI said on Tuesday it received the first three orders in a potential $500 million Other Transaction Agreement (OTA) production contract with the Missile Defense Agency (MDA).
In December 2021, the company said it established
a five-year OTA agreement with the Defense Department with an “accelerated timeline” to acquire the company’s suite of Enterprise AI products and allows any agency to acquire the products and services for modeling and simulation.
Now the company said these three orders will use the C3 AI platform to “to accelerate deployment of critical enterprise artificial intelligence capabilities across the MDA.”
The first order covers support efforts to quickly produce accurate representations of advanced threats via generative machine learning models.
The company argued as the agency develops the Next Generation Interceptor systems, “massive data sets are required to capture the total view of potential threats. These data sets can then be used for a variety of analyses and simulations.”
C3 AI said its enterprise AI application will allow MDA users to unify large data sets across the agency, covering physics-model outputs to intelligence sources; manage machine learning generative model pipelines; accurately generate novel threat signatures “in a fraction of the time of the agency’s current methods;” and export data in standard or compressed MDA formats compatible with engineering applications.
The second order seeks to equip MDA’s test programs with an AI application used to plan, analyze and execute missile defense system flight and ground test events. This includes pre- and post-test efforts, hardware-in-the-loop system tests and post-flight reconstruction.
The company said this solution is initially being deployed to an Impact Level 6 classified cloud environment. It is billed as being capable of integrating disparate flight and ground test data into a unified data model, configuring pipelines to automatically generate test analyses, and “launching AI-backed exploration of new insights.”
C3 AI said the third order further accelerates MDA’s ground test process via optimizing and automating key facets of the process; consolidating and unifying test requirements from multiple stakeholders; and ingesting, unifying, and analyzing engineering data at enterprise scale.
“The insights extracted from large volumes of sensor, network, and weapon system test data are critical to analyzing the operational effectiveness, suitability, and survivability of the Missile Defense System,” Shari Feth, MDA Innovation Science and Technology Director, said in a statement.
“The deployment of an enterprise AI platform has allowed MDA to demonstrate robust end-to-end capabilities for collaborating on AI model development and rapidly deploying insights into new production applications,” she continued.
“An enterprise AI platform that allows for credible assessment of combined kinetic and non-kinetic effects across domains is critical to optimize and correctly evaluate missile defense mission effectiveness. We are thrilled to fulfill the MDA’s first three orders in our five-year partnership,” Ed Abbo, C3 AI President and Chief Technology Officer, added.
The announcement did not include specific timelines or dollar values for each order.