IBM’s Greg Souchack: Army Could Leverage AI Platform to Analyze Transportation Costs

Greg Souchack, partner for managed services and cloud solutions at IBM’s global business services unit, has said the U.S. Army could leverage the company’s Watson artificial intelligence platform to help analyze spending on the transportation of spare parts and other shipment, C4ISRNET reported Thursday.

“The Army would like to see if Watson could look at all of those transportation decisions and be able to optimize that to reduce cost,” Souchack said.

IBM will provide the Army access to Watson and extend cloud and software development support to the service under a potential 33-month, $135 million recompete contract awarded Wednesday by the military branch’s logistics support activity.

Souchack also noted the Army’s adoption of AI through the contract seeks to reflect the expansion of the service’s cloud migration effort.

“Five years ago, the discussion around cloud was about infrastructure as a service, a way to get cheaper storage,” Souchack said.

“This moves up the stack in cloud adoption, leveraging powerful tools in a cloud-based environment to do those analytics,” he added, according to the report.