How Guidehouse's $1.5B AI investment will bring others in too

Guidehouse arguably has to make a big bet on artificial intelligence as a key cog of its strategy because AI is changing the world, rapidly, in ways that will not be understood for many years.

Which means there are two main ways to consider Guidehouse’s $1.5 billion investment in AI over the next three years. One involves the company itself in terms of how it runs internal functions and provides services to clients, and the second is in how those clients deploy this class of technologies at an enterprise scale.

Much of that investment will go toward a new AI Center of Excellence, training Guidehouse’s 18,000-employee company on how to use AI tools for their jobs and further grow partnerships with companies whose offerings show promise for use by clients at scale.

When Stuart Brown joined Guidehouse as technology leader in January, the company’s partnership ecosystem became one of his main areas of responsibilities. That includes global tech companies like the hyperscale cloud providers, startups and others in between.

“That means we're sitting down and having conversations (with partners) around how we go transform things, what assets they have, what intelligence and assets do we have, and how can we combine those,” Brown told WT. “We're trying to pull those together, around how we help transform some of our clients that we've already got on the docket, and then we're saying ‘How do we then go take new ideas to the government.’”

The training component of Guidehouse’s big AI bet is intended to build upon prior initiatives of core education in AI. Brown said Guidehouse has deployed AI copilots across the organization, but now the company is ready to do a broader codification of that.

Certifications, hackathons, lunch and learn sessions and other training events all are options for Guidehouse employees to upskill. Guidehouse wants to also offer AI training as-a-service for clients to do the same with their workforce, Brown said.

“Part of that is organizational change, which is educating the leadership on how they should think about it and measure,” Brown said. “This is not a tech thing, this is an organizational thing.”

As Brown told us and as other public sector leaders often tell us, there is so much more to success in large-scale technology implementations than just choosing the right software or other tool.

Change management and other workforce-centric aspects of those implementations will always have to lead the agenda for client and contractor alike in order to get things right and achieve big goals.

The first annual edition of Guidehouse’s Tech Guide for public sector and commercial professionals looks closely at change management and a lot of what the company calls “blind spots” on the change management front.

In fact, pothole number one the Guidehouse team identified as getting in the way of tech transformation is lack of change management. If people do not understand how to use a new tool or see the value in it, momentum dies quickly.

Those concepts come into greater focus when considering the Trump administration’s efforts to reform and overhaul how the federal government operates, while using technology and AI especially as a lever to push on those efforts.

“Change needs to be built into the model because change is inherently built into the political system. There's going to be new administrations, there's going to be new administrators, you've got the career folks, you've got the political folks,” Brown said. “How you build a model that’s adaptable to change without ripping the engine out every time we go down the road, and I think that's where AI and the new technology models are there.

“I'm starting to see a lot of the conversations turn to enterprise scale as opposed to quick wins,” Brown added.