Christine Thropp
Candice Ling, federal sector leader at Microsoft, was inducted into Executive Mosaic’s 2024 roster of Wash100 awardees for driving innovation in artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies.
Vote for Ling as one of your favorite awardees at Wash100.com. This year’s popular vote competition runs through April 30, so cast your 10 votes now!
2024 marks Ling’s debut on Executive Mosaic’s annual selection of 100 government and government contracting industry leaders. In its 11th year, the Wash100 continues to honor this elite group anticipated to drive the future of GovCon in addition to demonstrating vision, innovation and career excellence.
“As the head of Microsoft’s federal government business, Candice is instrumental in harnessing the company’s partnership with OpenAI to help federal agencies adopt and deploy cutting-edge artificial intelligence tools and technologies. In the age of AI, Candice’s leadership and knack for innovation in this area make her not only an exceptional steward of the next generation of technology, but also an obvious selection for our Wash100 list this year,” said Jim Garrettson, CEO of Executive Mosaic and founder of the Wash100 Award.
In July 2023, Ling was named to lead the federal organization at Microsoft, where she had been serving as vice president of federal government civilian business prior to the appointment.
“In this new era of government, I want to champion a public-private centered strategy, fostering co-innovation and accelerating time-to-mission. We are also dedicated to and laser-focused on accelerating AI adoption in support of your mission,” she said at that time.
Staying true to these objectives, Ling and Microsoft Federal fostered several partnerships focused on advancing AI and other emerging technologies.
Some of these partnerships are with Synthetaic for the development of Rapid Automatic Image Categorization, an AI-based image processing tool; Mitre for the update on ATLAS knowledge base by adding entries about generative AI-related vulnerabilities; and Forcepoint G2CI for the incorporation of the former’s cross-domain technologies into the latter’s Azure cloud service portfolio.
“Microsoft is innovating in AI to deliver technology for the public sector,” Ling wrote in a blog post. “As we embark on this new way to work, we are committed to delivering transformational AI innovations responsibly to drive government missions, aligned to the goals of the White House’s recent executive order for safe, secure and trustworthy AI.”
According to her, Microsoft plans to preview its Azure OpenAI Service in Azure Government to provide customers requiring higher levels of compliance and isolation with the latest generative AI capabilities.
“Azure OpenAI Service for Azure Government is purpose-built, AI-optimized infrastructure providing access to OpenAI’s advanced generative models that can help government agencies improve efficiency, enhance productivity, and unlock new insights from their data,” the Microsoft Federal leader emphasized.
She listed content creation and summarization, semantic search and code generation as some of the use cases for Azure OpenAI Service.
As the new year progresses, Executive Mosaic anticipates Ling’s continued AI innovation leadership and its impact on federal government missions and operations.
GovCon sector’s preeminent media, events and membership organization congratulates Candice Ling and the Microsoft Federal team for securing the 2024 Wash100 recognition. Don’t forget to vote for her at Wash100.com!
