Executive Spotlight: Ryan Legge, President of Analytics for BigBear.ai

Ryan Legge, president of Analytics for BigBear.ai, recently spoke with ExecutiveBiz regarding the work the company does to help its customers in areas like process improvement, enterprise management and data collection.

In addition, Legge also discussed BigBear.ai’s artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to ensure data hygiene and address the major challenges and products to drive decision dominance for our warfighters and digital transformation efforts in the federal sector during the latest Executive Spotlight interview.

“I just can’t emphasize enough the importance and our goal of making BigBear.ai a great place to work for our people. I think you see a lot of companies that struggle and lose their winning company culture as they expand and grow. The leaders at BigBear.ai want to do everything we can to ensure our people feel valued here. We want to make sure that people love to come to work at BigBear.ai, and we will do everything possible to make that happen.”

You can read the full Executive Spotlight interview with Ryan Legge below:

ExecutiveBiz: With more than 20 years of experience in sales, how are you working with your customers in the areas of process improvement, enterprise management and data collection, and analysis to address the greatest challenges that your clients face today? 

“I think a lot of the problems our customers faced ten to fifteen years ago are still very similar to the problems they face today. One change is the volume of data in the world has expanded. We used to not have enough data, and now there’s far too much. The inability to turn that data into actionable insights is the major challenge around the decision-making process for many of our government agencies and their senior leaders.

Our senior leaders across the defense and intelligence agencies are extremely good at making the best decisions they can, based on the information and data that’s available to them at that moment. The ability to get more timely and accurate data is where BigBear.ai comes into play.

We help our customers with the processes and techniques to pull insights out of the data to help the leadership and analysts make more informed and accurate decisions. To empower people to make the right decisions, at the right time, every time. Something we call ‘Decision Dominance.’

Streamlining our customers’ workflow and data collection processes will enable them to get timely information for their decisions. As a result, we are working to deliver decision support solutions and products that break down those manual processes and drive real-time analytics, which would be monumental to creating more informed decisions.”

ExecutiveBiz: With BigBear.ai’s advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities, what can you tell us about how AI/ML can ensure data hygiene and use the technology to address the significant challenges in our supply chain management process?

“One of the major challenges of AI/ML is having quality data to work with since real-world data is often messy, irregular, and error-prone. To solve this problem, our technology and products utilize tensor completion methods.

Tensor completion takes real-world data and regularizes it – enabling AI/ML models to receive better data for forecasting. One obstacle these machine learning techniques can address is the current supply chain challenges facing the world today.

One excellent example of how our technology can help with supply chain management is our recent success in the Project Overmatch challenge. Our tensor completion enabled forecasting of aircraft incursions in the Luzon Strait based upon the Navy’s spotty plane and ship-tracking data.

In this example, our AI/ML took the messy data provided, normalized it, and utilized it to forecast adversarial flyovers – with results that matched real-world events with a high degree of accuracy.

Further, our technology enables the user to prepare model responses and see how those might impact the outcome of forecasted events. Following the example above, if the US increased patrols in the area, our models suggested that those flyovers would have reduced in intensity if they occurred at all.

Imagine using models like this for supply-chain optimization – you could not only forecast where advantageous or derogatory events might occur but also optimize responses to those events.”

ExecutiveBiz: At the end of last year, BigBear.ai received a contract award from the US Army based around Global Force Management (GFIM). How will this contract’s work and the company’s expertise in these areas drive the Army’s data-driven decision-making structure?

“It was an exciting moment for the company receiving one of two Global Force Management (“GFIM”) Phase 1 Prototype contracts. BigBear.ai has a long history of working with the Army and supporting their critical missions in logistics, readiness, sourcing, and most importantly, force management.

This contract will demonstrate the full range of our core technical capabilities, including automated process management, advanced analytics, cyber, and cloud. It will also allow our team to capitalize on our core strengths, our deep knowledge of the Army and its processes.

Customer knowledge is a vital component of successful delivery for any customer. However, if you don’t possess the combination of domain expertise and technical ability, it will be an uphill battle.

GFIM-OE is one of the Army’s top business priorities and will serve as the single-entry point for conducting force management activities for an Army “at rest” and “in motion.” The platform will integrate force structure readiness, mobilization, and validation requirements to meet the global force management requirement. It’s a transformational approach to the Army’s ability to enable its Deploy to Redeploy and Retrograde of Materiel end-to-end business process from the enterprise to the tactical edge.

Once the solution is fully operational, it should support 160,000 users and include senior leaders and combatant commanders from the top of the company through division levels. Moreover, it will enable the Army to achieve that decision dominance by making data-driven enforcement for structured decisions as well as being faster and more complex.

We are hopeful to take these capabilities to other government agencies and the commercial sector. I think automating and getting process management to accelerate is something that both the private and public sector can use.”

ExecutiveBiz: What can you tell us about BigBear.ai’s appearance at DoDIIS Worldwide back in Dec.? What did the company showcase in its achievements and products to drive decision dominance for our warfighters? What does the immediate future hold for BigBear.ai?

“DoDIIS last year was extremely fun and a sort of coming-out party for BigBear.ai. The appearance at the conference was a culminating event for us after the successful integration of four amazing companies, NuWave Solutions, PCI, BigBear LLC, and Pro Model Government Solutions.

DoD ISS Worldwide is one of the largest conferences for the intelligence community. Many of our customers and partners had known what we’ve done across the legacy companies, but they didn’t know the true power and capability we offered as a unified organization.

We were one of the event’s Premier sponsors, which was topped off with the fantastic networking social called ‘Camp BigBear.’ It was a special week that allowed us to showcase our company’s achievements, talented workforce, and demo our capabilities to potential customers and partners. In addition, we were able to secure several meetings with key stakeholders and senior leaders across the intelligence community and defense, which will continue to lead to enhanced growth in the future.

We were also lucky that the conference just so happened to coincide with our announcement of going public as we were listed on the New York Stock Exchange on December 5th. Going public will enable us to continue growing and expanding our solutions and products.

And with that expansion, we will continue to provide an excellent workplace for our employees, which gives them the chance to grow and advance their careers. No matter what you do as a company, you’re only as successful as your foundation, which is the employees.

As a newly public company, I think that’s one of the things that we’re all excited about the most, being able to push the envelope a little faster than we would have as a smaller company while still maintaining the same company culture.”