SAIC CEO Toni Townes-Whitley drives new era of growth for the defense tech company with AI

The business of war, deterrence, and national security has long incorporated cutting-edge technology.

Toni Townes-Whitley, the CEO of Science Applications International Corporation, or SAIC (SAIC), is on a mission to drive that cutting-edge technology but to do so ethically.

Townes-Whitley took over the top job at Virginia-based SAIC in October 2023 while the Russia-Ukraine war raged on and just days before Hamas’s attack on Israel. Tasked with bringing the 55-year-old company into the modern age and expanding its reach, Townes-Whitley set to work shifting SAIC’s efforts to a more robust, tech-driven approach.

“As soon as that conflict was communicated, SAIC had teams on the ground supporting customers that were providing capabilities there,” Townes-Whitley told Yahoo Finance (video above). “You’re in the middle of a global conflict: What data is flowing? How can that data be shared, not only with the US forces but with multiple coalition forces?”

The key to Townes-Whitley’s vision — and to SAIC’s transformation — has been introducing artificial intelligence into SAIC’s offerings and setting standards for “ethical AI,” which Townes-Whitley says is imperative to ensuring the company’s leadership as a provider of security and military software and resources.

“Think of the ethics as a portfolio of understanding the maturity of the technology, its ability to actually do what it says,” Townes-Whitley explained. “Initial AI was so immature. We were just testing to see what the algorithms could do. So was the AI itself ethical? It was just simply immature.”

She added that SAIC considers possible sensitive and unintended use cases for its technology, such as the consequences of biometric identification in the judicial system and in various industries. At its 24,000-square-foot testing facility in Maryland, company scientists continue to test ways AI can bring security, technology, and public trust together in more ethical and profitable ways.

“We built the first ethical framework for AI at Microsoft, and now at SAIC, we have the same kinds of frameworks about how we think about the consequences of the technology we’re building,” she added.

‘Challenge ideas, not each other’

SAIC is much more than a provider of military systems and supporting technology. Since its founding in 1967, the company has broadened its focus over the years to specialize in data analysis, security, and modern warfare — specifically by supplying technology and resources to the US military, one of its biggest customers.

The $7.1 billion company is also involved in non-military operations and support, including training all US air traffic controllers using operational AI.

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Despite years of success, SAIC has suffered from competition as well as a lack of innovation. It also had a less-than-energized workforce that wasn’t being as proactive or creative in bringing new forms of technology and cybersecurity to the table.

Townes-Whitley has started to tackle this by investing in SAIC’s workforce.

“We know that the skills we will need are not just skills we can find in the market,” she said. “We’ve got to incubate them here. We’ve got 25,000 employees. We’ve got to upskill some of these employees in the critical skill areas. So that’s another key investment — our human capital.”

Beyond technology, Townes-Whitley has focused on fostering an inclusive culture throughout her career and within SAIC.

“What I love about applied innovation tech is an industry that in some ways it’s sort of democratizing,” she said. “You can come from anywhere and if you’re excellent at it, there are opportunities. We just have to make sure those avenues are open.”

As one of only two Black women leading a Fortune 500 company, she emphasized the importance of bringing her whole self to work and encouraged her teams to do the same.

“We have to challenge each other respectfully,” Townes-Whitley said. “SAIC has a very military culture — lots of, ‘Yes, ma’am. No, ma’am.’ But we can’t let that stop us from getting to root-cause discussions. We need to challenge ideas, not each other.”

By land, air, sea, and space

Townes-Whitley’s year of transformation as CEO has included forming SAIC’s national imperatives, its list of critical challenges in the US that require technology, which she said are key to driving both internal and external engagement. These imperatives include undersea dominance, border security, improving citizen experience, all-domain warfighting, and next-generation space technologies.

These priorities reflect the strategic demands of SAIC’s top clients, including NASA and the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security.

“When we launched the imperatives … [everybody was] doing their thing,” Townes-Whitley recalled. “And we start talking about all-domain or we start talking about next-generation space or the citizen experience, and heads are up, shoulders are back, phones are down.”

“People are leaning into it because it’s the mission of why they come to work,” she added.

That leaning in, driven by Townes-Whitley’s past experience in technology, and reinforced by her upbringing as the daughter of a decorated three-star general, is what some analysts attribute to SAIC’s more recent success.

SAIC’s stock price has risen by about 30% during Townes-Whitley’s first year as CEO, and the company has secured significant new deals — among them a $229 million contract to advance IT solutions for NORAD and US Northern Command.

To be sure, Townes-Whitley insists that success is not just about the size of the deals; it’s about their alignment with SAIC’s mission and long-term strategy, which, from her vantage point, involves not just AI but ethical AI.

“Absolutely there’s a commercial element to what we do,” Townes-Whitley said. “But fundamentally, this organization is all about moving the mission forward, about protecting this country, and about changing the way citizens engage with their government.”

“And so I feel no concern about where our heart and our head is — that you can do good things and also make money and take care of our shareholders and meet the expectations,” she said.

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