The GovNavigators Show

AI for Readiness: Making Sense of Defense Data with Rob Bocek

• Season 4 • Episode 150

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This week on The GovNavigators Show, Robert and Adam are joined by Rob Bocek, Chief Commercial Officer at Virtualitics, for a conversation on how artificial intelligence is reshaping defense readiness.

Drawing on his wide experience from Navy Special Warfare to Microsoft, Rob explains how AI can help the Department of Defense move beyond fragmented data and toward faster, more informed decision-making. We explore how these tools surface hidden readiness gaps, improve situational awareness, and support leaders operating in high-stakes, time-sensitive environments.

Rob also walks through how Virtualitics is helping defense leaders make sense of massive, fragmented datasets, using AI-powered analytics to surface hidden risks, identify readiness gaps, and support faster, more confident decision-making. He explains how their approach emphasizes explainable AI, enabling operators and commanders to trust and act on insights in real time.

Show Notes:

What's on the GovNavigators' Radar:

Mar 24:

Mar 25: 

SPEAKER_00

Welcome everyone to the Gov Navigator Show, a government-focused program that won't make you seasick. We're the Gov Navigators. I'm Robert Check. And I'm Adam Hughes. We hope to enlighten and enliven your week with news and insightful, entertaining guests, all on the topic of government management.

SPEAKER_02

Enjoy today's episode of Gov Navigators, brought to you by the creative geniuses behind the award-winning podcast Fedheads. So we should probably just cancel everything else and talk the whole show about the budget.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. I mean, there's so much to go through. Also, why is there always so much to go through when there's things like March Madness happening last week? You know, like can't I just get a quiet week for watching basketball in a bar? Well, then what would people like me do who could give a rat's you know what?

SPEAKER_02

Sure. That's okay, fine. I'm glad you were around. It's perfect. So as you know, DHS remains under a lapsed appropriation. Yeah. TSA officers are getting the blue flu. Yep. The administration put up a proposal to hopefully reopen things, and Senator Thune said, Senators, this is the real threat, may not have the week off next week in order to get the pass.

SPEAKER_00

Also true. And hey, honestly, you know, I'm flying to Florida, so if we can wrap this up in the next day or two, I would appreciate it. That's really the important part. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Might be the straw that breaks the camel's back right there.

SPEAKER_00

But the White House's proposal has that has some things in there that may loosen the log jam, but not enough, I don't think, to actually get Democrats to say yes, let's go forward. But there's at least something to talk about. Yeah. Any talking is better than no talking for sure. So we're, you know, fingers crossed, we're optimistic.

SPEAKER_02

So while that's going on, it looks like the Department of War is gonna send up a request for supplemental appropriations to the tune of about$200 billion. That's a lot. That's a lot of money. And I uh I was talking to a Washington Post reporter who said that it appears OMB bought it like the bloody death. But but they lost. And they're gonna they're gonna lose again because a week from today, it looks like at least rumored that the president's budget will be released.

SPEAKER_00

Will it be longer or shorter than the national cybersecurity strategy?

SPEAKER_02

So that's a good question. That's a good benchmark. That's what we should take a bet on. Yes. What I did hear is that this will include this has actually been talked about, a 50% increase in the Department of Defense budget on top of the$200 billion supplemental request. Oh, that'll buy some nice party ass.$1.5 trillion. Oh my lord. You know what Gov Navigators can do with$1.5 trillion?

SPEAKER_00

I I wouldn't even know where to begin. I mean, we could waste it pretty quickly.

SPEAKER_02

A lot of party's millions.

SPEAKER_00

We could take on a Brewster's Millions challenge. Yeah. Yeah. Except it would be a lot more money than that. Wow. So one of the things I was thinking about with the with the 200 billion request is this sort of are we going back to the overseas contingency operations fund that DOD used to have that essentially was like a shadow war budget? Yes. I don't think so. I don't yeah, I mean maybe, but the there always have been supplementals to DOD during times of conflict. The fact that the OCO was like absorbed into the underlying budget at DOD, that's I'm gonna keep be keeping a bit of an eye on that, particularly with the president's budget coming out too, because that that does have a lot of implications for planning and and budgets and deficits. And it will have implications for whether that 200 billion is going to pass, because if senators see it as a one-time thing, they may be more inclined, and and members of the house more inclined to vote for it. If they see this as just ways to continue to pad and increase the budget for DOD, DOW, excuse me, it may be harder to pass. So thin margins still in the house. So it's it's it's not a not a done deal.

SPEAKER_02

But with all that money sloshing around, you gotta be worried about fraud. Yep. How about that? How about that segue? It's almost like we're professionals. Thank God. The administration issued an executive order creating a task force to eliminate fraud, chaired by J.D.

SPEAKER_00

Vance. I mean, you know what solves problems, government bureaucracy. That's what solves problems for sure.

SPEAKER_02

Listen to you talking like a conservative agencies have 30 days to identify their most fraud vulnerable transactions, 60 days to adopt minimum anti-fraud standards, and 90 days to submit implementation plans. Oh boy.

SPEAKER_00

More more plans to sit on shelves. I think this will go great. No, I'm mostly kidding. I mean, I think having very senior level focus on this issue in any administration, having it chaired by the vice president, I think that can help to really move things forward faster. But I also kind of think we kind of already know what we need to do, right? Don't we have all the answers? We're just not putting them in place. So I if this task force can focus on why that's happening, I think that will help. If they're just gonna ask agencies to write up a report about how they're gonna make fraud harder and better, I don't think it's gonna add a lot of value.

SPEAKER_02

The uh it looks like Congress is also uh gonna tee up a number of anti-fraud provisions in reconciliation, which is rumored to be under consideration for the summer.

SPEAKER_00

Rumored yet again to be under consideration. Sometimes it's on, sometimes it's up. Well, and we've got we've got some additional shared approaches happening in the government this week, too, with OPM announced a new HR shared service center in formulation at their agency, likely to be the place where this one platform for HR for the entire government would sit. That was a pretty good release. I think that it makes a lot of sense what they're doing.

SPEAKER_02

Uh but with the with the exception of HUD, there's some pretty small agencies.

SPEAKER_00

So correct. Yeah. You saw that that's always the that's always a good plan. And then you also talked about you talked to me about this acquisition QSMO, also in the correlation at GSA.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. I I think the concern is with the vast number of contract writing systems that are in operation across government, so that they say there are 229? Who counted those? There's gotta be more than that. They're gonna bring some sense to that madness. Yeah. Are you ready for our guest?

SPEAKER_00

I'm ready for readiness.

SPEAKER_02

So Adam, what does readiness mean to you? Wait, am I not ready? Did I do something wrong? I mean our guest today is gonna set us straight since you obviously are not. I know nothing about it, clearly. Yeah. Rob Bochek uh is chief commercial officer with virtualytics, which he's gonna tell us all about. But before we dive into that, Rob, you've got a fascinating background. You wanna enlighten us about how you got to where you are?

SPEAKER_01

Sure. I'd love to. Robert Adam, Rob Bochek here, Chief Commercial Officer at Virtualytics. I've been here for about two and a half years now. Really exciting time for sure. I've been in the defense tech, I'll say, kind of disruptive growth market now for about 16 years, seven of which was that Microsoft leading teams on the national security vertical. And then love Microsoft to uh to get back into really that agile, innovative, moving incredibly fast, a startup pace. And so been in everything from directed energy, high-powered microwave development for counter drone technology to privacy enhancing technologies and homomorphic encryption to now what we're doing here at VirtualEtics.

SPEAKER_02

Prior to like five shows.

SPEAKER_01

Prior to coming into the industry, spent 10 years, just under 10 years as a naval officer in a Navy Special Warfare. So graduated from the Naval Academy with a weapon systems engineering background and then jumped straight into the SEAL teams and was able to serve through four combat deployments. So care very deeply about still being able to contribute and serve in some capacity and really the technologies and the innovation that we're bringing forward that are relevant and purposeful.

SPEAKER_00

That's amazing, Rob. Thank you for your service first and foremost. We appreciate it. And I love your comment too about, you know, I feel like people that go into public service, people that serve in the military, that sort of never leaves you, right? It's always forefront in your mind and the your work to continue to figure ways to give back, I think is fantastic. Okay. Well, to let's jump in then. Tell us about what you're doing now. Why leave Microsoft? Sound like you were doing some pretty cool stuff at Microsoft too. Why leave to do this? And tell us a little bit about what your company does now.

SPEAKER_01

Great question. You know, Microsoft definitely very near and dear to my heart. I think the the reach, the scale of companies like Microsoft, really tremendous. And I think one thing I really missed was just the agility and that speed and to get as close as we can to the end user communities and then be able to bring that signal back directly into our product and design engineering teams to make sure that what goes forward is absolutely relevant. You know, what really brought me to Virtualytics was really exciting, frankly, the mission that we're supporting and the impact that we were realizing as a very young company. A little bit about Virtualytics commercialized in 2016 and came out of the NASA JPL and Caltech space. In fact, the co-founders were part of the core team for the NASA Curiosity Rover mission early on, looking at synthesizing data and insights coming back from the surface of Mars. What really drew me to this company, though, is really as pioneers in the AI space, even before it really blew up to what it is today. And Virtualytics is really focused. We focus here a lot on readiness. We're an AI company that looks at taking cutting-edge technologies and methodologies and applying that to understand the gaps as it pertains to readiness across the federal government and principally the Department of War. And readiness is kind of a broad subject, you know. So, how does one, you know, define readiness? And a lot of the work and the partnership that we've experienced over the past few years with the department really define readiness as the force's ability or inability to action mission-essential tasks. So basically, they're on charter to execute specific tasks, and they are either prepared or they are degraded to execute those objectives. And so our AI is really tuned to understand what is causing a degrader. And that's across personnel, material, and say asset availability or maintenance as an example. And so our AI models are really tuned to uncover what those choke points may be, what's causing the degraders. And then more importantly, it's providing a decision intelligence framework, recommended courses of action, specific sequencing to close those gaps and ensure that the total force is prepared.

SPEAKER_02

So what you're talking about is on the front pages every day today. I don't I'm not I don't know how much you can talk about this, but it it would seem to me trying to persuade the end user to trust what your tools are telling them to act on that, you're now really testing. Tell us how that evolution of trust occurs.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, it's a really good question. It's a very relevant question. Yeah, what we're seeing a lot of the black box AI technologies that are being implemented where there's really not a lot of explainability behind various recommended courses of action or decision intelligence behind it. It is very challenging to gain the trust to deploy at scale. And that again is one thing that's very unique to virtualytics is that everything that we do ties back to an explainability component. It's not enough just to say recommend it, the recommended course of action is X. You have to be able to provide the connective tissue to be able to interrogate the data and interrogate the algorithm to say, here's why. Clearly, the human always needs to remain, you know, center to be able to make the decision. And that's really what we are, that's really how we see our platform and our technology is augmenting human cognition. We want to be able to take our AI and look across massive amounts of data, fragmented data silos and data sets, and be able to bring that together in a relatively quick fashion and provide to the decision maker all options, but in a way that's explainable. So they can make sure they can be confident that the decision that they are making is the best decision.

SPEAKER_00

So if I'm understanding you, it sounds like you're you're automating a lot of back-end research data gathering, some of the very manual work that goes on at agencies now trying to break down data silos. But it's not uh, you're not automating the decisions and the work itself. That's all you're putting that in the hands of decision makers. Is that a correct read of it? And talk a little about how does that manifest itself for folks? Is this at the commander and the general level? Is it, are you giving this to folks in the field? Where does it sit right now in the work that you're doing at DOW? Sure. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

So that's, you know, I think principally important is that the tools that we build are not designed for just the data science community. You don't need to have a PhD to understand, you know, what you're looking at. It needs to be accessible, it needs to be relevant and timely at every echelon. So with many of our customers, and I'll say in the case of the Air Force, we've been deployed now and supporting various submission organizations now for almost five years. We're being utilized at the three-star echelon for, say, major resourcing type decisions and understanding the risk implications behind that all the way down to the frontline, say maintainer, senior NCOs on the flight line, and incorporating this into their daily uh SOPs. And really, not to sound cliche, but it really is democratizing the use of AI across across the mission verticals. So that's where I think the utility is. And that's also in order to get to that point, you have to have the trust, which ties to the explainability component for sure.

SPEAKER_02

So I hope this isn't redundant, but a lot of the government is stuck in pilot mode or you know, limited use cases where adoption is restrained for a variety of reasons. Access to the right tools, access to data, you know, governance. Do you have a playbook for accelerating from pilot to adoption?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, yeah, I think that's really been the theme here, really, the past 24 months. And I'll say kind of back to virtualytics, we are really on this, really on a tear. I mean, rapid growth over the past 24 months. I mean, our revenues have quadrupled. We're seeing massive adoption now across every single service component. And I think it goes back, Robert, to your question. It's kind of leaning in some early Pathfinder efforts, you know, try a little, share a little, learn a lot. So it's this idea of kind of creating a beachhead and land and expand. Tremendous amount of learning that's happening with these end-user mission communities, as far as what are the what's the full extent of how to utilize AI, how can that help us through the context of ensuring our forces are ready for whatever that mission set may be at some point in the future. So, how do you predict? It's not just understanding current state of readiness. It's I want to understand six months out, 13 months out, what's to come, and where are my blind spots as an organization? Um, and so really that's where I think we've seen the most success. As an example, you know, a lot of our experience has been working with the sustainment and logistics community across the Air Force. That has now grown into other organizations with the Marine Corps. The Navy is now looking to come on very strong to solve other types of problems, doing some work with supply chain optimization. And now that's even led to other use cases that are completely outside of logistics and sustainment around personnel preparedness with military law enforcement. Do we have the right people that are trained, equipped, and enabled and have, you know, whatever the specific requirements are to service specific mission sets and where are they located and how do we do that alignment? These are some great use cases. And what's interesting is we're seeing the services come together and start to share what those learnings are. What are the problems that you solved? How did you approach the technology? What was the experience with virtualytics? How quickly can we start to see mission impact? You know, what is the true ROI? And so those organizations that are relatively new to wanting to dip their toe in, they will go and spend a full day with other services that are, you know, at scale and fully deployed. And I think that's what emboldens them to say, yes, we're ready, let's go. And so that it's that blueprint that has been highly successful for us over the past two years.

SPEAKER_02

You know, it's funny listening to you. I think when I started this conversation, I thought the Department of War might have been a tough hill to climb as far as adoption is concerned. But there's so many other use cases outside of DOW. And now I'm thinking, you know, emergency response, disease response, law enforcement, you know. Talk about what other entities of the federal government you see on the horizon that could really benefit from what y'all are doing. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01

I mean, the applications are, you know, far and wide and can expand, you know, in many different directions. I mean, we have a solution that's also deployed that looks at material optimization from a storage standpoint and also from a load planning, which could be readily made available to other organizations if they're looking at packing density. How do we save space when we have volume constricted or restricted areas for sensitive type material? Some cases we're using it for munitions, could be applied to blood supplies, pharmaceuticals. There's a lot of other, you know, it's broad applicability. I'll say, you know, some of the other things too that we're doing that are really interesting. You know, we have a multi-agent or an agentic framework that uses some large language models. And what does that allow us to do? It's not enough now just to have these AI-generated dashboards that surfaces information, which you know, users and decision commanders have to sort through, parse through, and still try and figure out well, what's the best alternative? If I don't have a good course of action, what's the least bad? But what we implemented, we saw the need for, and I guess that's also one thing about virtualytics. We really want to start at the end user, understand the problem, and then work back designed to what they need. And what they needed was really access to a decision now in the immediate near term or the immediate term. So we created our chat interface, something we launched about two months ago, we call Iris. And that uses an agentic framework, but it allows a user, again, at any echelon, to ask very detailed and complex questions and get an immediate return back. And questions such as, you know, what is at risk right now? You know, which force element is at risk, what is driving that risk? And maybe something like what degrades first if a condition changes. And then from that point, you know, you get a return, and then you can drill down and say, okay, if I select this option, you know, what is causing the degradation in the next seven days as an example? And so you can start at a high level, what's the problem I'm trying to solve, get an immediate return, and then use that to drill down and start to build out a course of action rapidly. That's game changing. The department award does not have a capability mature at scale like that today. And so we're really excited to be on the forefront of bringing these capabilities forward.

SPEAKER_00

It's like those old choose your own adventure books in middle school, right? And then you do this, you turn to this page, and then it launches a whole new set. I can see you shaking your head, Robert. It's actually nothing like that. Degrading the sophisticated technology that they've built.

SPEAKER_01

Well, it's also complicated because if you are looking at maybe one area of responsibility or say one organization, if I'm degraded here, or say I decide to push forward with that, how am I degraded maybe in a different area or with a different organization? That there may be some dotted line, and I need to understand those downstream effects, second and third order effects. Now with this technology, you can do that. And these data sets are fragmented. So that information is currently siloed. And I think that's the biggest challenge is that readiness, it's really shaped by those interconnected constraints. And so we're removing that boundary and now providing that insight rapidly to the end user.

SPEAKER_02

What are the silos that you cross?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. That's a fascinating way to look at it too, though, because you don't there's nothing that exists like that a lot of the times, right? You make a decision, you don't necessarily know what was the path that I could have taken and why how could it have worked out better, and who else is this impacting other than me? Like when you're at a huge organization, that's really hard to see have those sight lines.

SPEAKER_01

Exactly right.

SPEAKER_00

So, Rob, talk a little bit about the future. I feel like you you're at a company now that the technology came up in the space program essentially. You guys are kind of on the cutting edge. What are you thinking about like six, twelve, twenty-four months from now? How is what you're doing now going to impact the way that agencies buy things, plan, budget? Like I feel like there's so many different ways that we could talk about how the tools that you've created will impact the way that government operates. That share a little thought on you have on that and maybe conversations you've had about where you think things are headed.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, yeah, that's a good question. If I had a crystal ball sort of thing. I think, and I know, you know, as a company, we are. I think you're in charge of this. You're in charge of this, right? We we are all very proud Americans. We are thrilled, you know, to be on that cutting edge. And we've we've kind of been where we're working very hard over the past 10 years to really establish our health ourselves as bringing these advanced capabilities forward. We we are proud to be partnered with the department to bring relevant technology forward. We also know outside of the department there are use cases that matter as well. We're also looking very closely at international expansion. We know that there are similar technologies, or I should say similar pieces of military equipment, whether they be aircraft, ships, personnel, you know, it's the same problem set abroad. And so they're sorting through some of the same problems. And so we We are preparing and starting to take a hard look at where internationally there could be some impact here. I think now that we've essentially moved our technology into every single service component and using these technologies in various use cases. And now we're getting noticed at some of the highest levels, which is really exciting to see. So we're uh you know, we're pouring fuel on the fire, we're all in, we're bringing, you know, the team's expanding rapidly, and we're trying to stay laser focused on where we bring the greatest value and really where that demand signal is. But we definitely know that over the horizon there's going to be room to expand smartly as well. We're not trying to dilute our focus. We're really trying to stay where the biggest value, biggest return is.

SPEAKER_02

I don't want to get too dull here, but do you all participate in the debate or the formulation of regulation around AI? Do you see where the government or Congress ought to put guardrails up or at least set the boundaries by which government adopts AI and other similar technologies?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, it's a fair question. Robert, I guess I would say this. You know, we at Virtualytics are confident that the policymakers, you know, are making the decisions and putting in place, you know, what is needed to put our warfighters and our national defenders' interests first. And our focus principally remains on bringing the most advanced technology to support the readiness mission to the fullest extent possible. That's how we're going to do that.

SPEAKER_00

Well, Rob, that's this has been a fascinating conversation. We're about out of time. Any last thoughts you wanted to share? I think learning about your background and what you're doing at Virtualytics is uh fantastic, but I'm also keen to understand like w whether you think that this is gonna change what will have a ripple effect across government, right? I mean, I think you guys are open. We've talked about other use cases outside of Department of War. Do you think that this is the type of technology that's gonna be driving changes at agencies and state governments and elsewhere? Talk a little about how you see this playing out outside of the Department of War work that you've been doing so far.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, 100%. I I do think that you know this is the future. I think we're just scratching the surface in terms of what these types of technologies can enable, you know, outside of the department. I know there's tremendous interest, you know, in how do we optimize human performance. That's come up quite a bit, you know, lots of areas too, and looking at medical readiness, medical devices, tremendous amount of data that's been you know captured on those of those assets now for many years. And we also know that as some organizations are scaling back, maybe they're medical technicians, there's gonna be an opportunity to increase a clear understanding of what you know, tier one assets need to stay alive. And at some point in time in the future, what may degrade? How is it gonna degrade? What are the implications for supply and our you know, our supplier base supporting that as well too? You could even take this and extend it as far as looking at some of the critical resources in different parts of the world and where those implications also are as well. So looking kind of all the way up and down the supply chain. And that's these are areas where AI is able to take a very complex problem like that and then put it and provide that decision intelligence to any user. We know that, you know, even looking at things like the postal service, we know sorting machines are critical assets. How do you optimize you know ground transport and packing density? Anything that has a shelf life as well, pharmaceuticals, understanding optimal placement and storage of assets like that that do have a shelf life. Again, great use cases for AI. And these are all areas that we're looking to expand to as well. Dizzying.

SPEAKER_02

Dizzying. Thanks for spending time with us and sharing it. It's really cool. It's an area where people are really moving out. So it's great to see.

SPEAKER_01

You bet, guys. It's a lot of fun. Really great meeting you both.

SPEAKER_00

You know, Robert, I always am astounded by the scope of the work that goes on just in the small little pond of the guests of the Gov Navigator show.

SPEAKER_02

It is impressive.

SPEAKER_00

I'm proud to say. That was great. It was pretty cool. Yeah, it was really cool hearing what they're what they're doing. Pretty cutting edge stuff.

SPEAKER_02

So what do you got on tap this week? I mean, more basketball. Yeah. The productivity of Gov Navigators is plummeting as we speak.

SPEAKER_00

So we should have a screener for like anyone that we hire kind of comes in. Like Hillary is perfect for this. Do you watch March Madness? Do you play golf? Answer no, you're hired. Right. Because if we get into that, then the summers are just gonna plummet. We don't have room for two of you. Yeah, so that'll be going on, and we got spring break coming up. So that I've got my eye on that for sure.

SPEAKER_02

So your priorities are clear. I've got my radar, the Hill and Valley Forum, which is chock full of good America forward management topics.

SPEAKER_00

That's lovely. You know, I'm not cool enough to get an invite to the fancy events. That's that's reserved for the CEO.

SPEAKER_02

Get in line. And then the oversight committee is hosting a hearing on March 25th, doing more with less, deleting duplicative programs. Oh my god, wait, is GAO testifying? They have a report they write about this. It's I suspect they are, but the hearing memo is not on the website.

SPEAKER_00

I know. Let's let's get going. Come on. What are you guys working hard up there? Don't have time to do it. Have a great week. Thanks for listening to another episode of the Gov Navigator Show, brought to you by GovNavigators. We sure hope you enjoyed it and learned something in the process. And didn't get C sick. Right, of course. If you want to know more about us and what we're up to, please follow us on social media or visit govnavigators.com. Ahoy!