William McCormick
Jeffrey Phelan, chief technologist of Public Sector business with H2O, recently spoke with ExecutiveBiz regarding how emerging technology initiatives continue to impact the company’s digital transformation efforts as well as how recent telework changes are impacting the business and driving the greater success of its workforce during the latest Executive Spotlight interview.
You can read the full interview with Jeffrey Phelan below.
ExecutiveBiz: How have the recent changes of operations and influence of telework impacted your business and driven your workforce to advance in such a competitive and ever-changing landscape?
Jeffrey Phelan: “When the pandemic started, our CEO Sri Ambati rallied around his ‘AI 4 Good’ philosophy to bring all of the benefits of AI to quickly solve many of the emerging supply chain and healthcare challenges introduced by COVID-19.
We quickly expanded our core focus of empowering AI through our open source platform H2O-3, and began deploying the world’s largest team of Kaggle Grand Masters (Grand Masters are the world’s top Data Scientists) to ‘Democratize AI’ by developing sophisticated yet easy-to-use software and tools that could be quickly deployed across the globe to deal with a real-time health data analysis problem facing the world.
The pandemic initiated the development of a whole new line of products, tools, and capabilities that are now running inside some of the largest companies and organizations in the world.
Our platform is used daily to solve Billion dollar scale problems and the products that were built during the pandemic are key components that address these very difficult data and business challenges.”
ExecutiveBiz: With the influence of emerging technologies impacting every aspect of business, how has H2O been able to drive digital transformation efforts to stay ahead of innovation in the federal landscape for yourself and your customers?
Jeffrey Phelan: “As I mentioned earlier, we have a commitment to ‘Democratize AI’ which means we want to make it easy to use, easy to deploy, and easy to understand – which then leads to Trust.
Trusted AI is at the core of efforts in government that you see expressed by the Responsible AI Directives you see coming out at the DoD, as well as frameworks developed by the GAO for across all of government, at NIST, and in other areas of the government.
Building Trusted AI into the fabric of your Decision frameworks, Workflow Automations, Modernization of infrastructures & systems, and to combat problem areas like Fraud, Waste, and Abuse allows organizations to transform from the inside out, which tends to lead to long-term success and benefits that can really move the needle.
Our Trusted approach is applicable on the battlefield, across all of healthcare, throughout the supply chain, and in information & sensor intensive environments in the intelligence community.
Since we have Explainability, Visualizations, Documentation, and Metrics built into every component of our AI platform, our ‘white box’ philosophy of transparency spurs users to go beyond experimentation and move more rapidly into production.
AI projects that historically have taken 9-12 months to deploy (if they even got out of the lab) are now completed in 2-3 weeks. This has a massive transformational impact that builds confidence with the technical, business, and mission stakeholders which drives wider adoption that typically improves the ROI of the effort.
It’s a ‘flywheel effect’ that teams take advantage of to avoid costs, improve efficiencies, reduce burden, and lower complexity in organizations and agencies that must keep up with a flood of data.
Our open source pedigree makes these transformations less difficult because we effectively plug into everything they’ve already invested in – we have 100’s of connectors and adapters that let users deploy our platform with relative speed and ease.”
ExecutiveBiz: How does H2O ensure long-term success for your workforce to drive value for your employees as you continue to face the uphill challenge to recruit and retain the best talent in the federal marketplace?
Jeffrey Phelan: “As the largest open-source AI & ML software company in the world our machine learning libraries are used by more than 200,000 users and 20,000 companies, including OEMs like DataRobot, DataIku, c3.ai, DataBricks.
Hyperscalers such as AWS and Google require H2O.ai expertise for many of their data and analytics positions so our long-term success is reflected in the number and scale of our deployments across the globe.
Our biggest challenge in the Public Sector is building awareness of our Hybrid Cloud of enterprise products that are so prevalent across industry. We are bullish on the future based on our widespread successes in the regulated and financial industry sectors which rely on Trust, Transparency, and Repeatability as core strengths of the H2O.ai platform.
As with any well-functioning government, Transparency and Trust is paramount to everything being done. With our agency partners, it’s critical to establish trust between the technical minds and the decision-makers. If all sides don’t understand the decision at hand or the rationale, you can’t establish true trust – which negatively impacts the mission – and no one wins.
Everyone wins when you get the right AI or Machine Learning models built, they are well documented and understood, business users have a clear understanding of the value, and these Applications move regularly into production.
H2O.ai is an expert at building AI & ML Apps that run in production and as a result, the finest data scientists, engineers, analysts, and business users that live on data flock to our platform. Our Grand Masters continue to improve the H2O.ai platform which creates more value, confidence, and trust in our offerings across industry, and now – with the government.”
