Amentum promotes industry veteran to build enterprise-wide AI operating model

Amentum has promoted Sam Nazari to chief artificial intelligence architect, a newly-created position for the company.

The title itself also helps illustrate how Amentum is approaching AI.

By adding the “architect” term to his title, Amentum is tasking Nazari with leading both execution and implementation. Nazari will work both on internal AI efforts and externally with customers.

“It’s rarely the algorithm that’s the thing,” Nazari told Washington Technology in his first interview as CAIA. “It’s mostly the operating context and the infrastructure that allow you to scale and make something meaningful happen.”

The timing of his new role reflects where the market is going. Customers are moving past AI pilots toward deployments.

The main challenge for customers now is operational maturity — turning pilots and experiments into measurable capabilities embedded in real mission workflows.

"The question is no longer whether organizations will use AI," Nazari said. "They already are."

One main priority for Nazari is building what he describes as an AI operating model at Amentum. A key tool for Nazari is the AI Technical Connection Network that enables people across the 50,000-person company to share their ideas and experiences in using AI to serve their customers.

“It’s basically a culture that is grassroots led and is doing a lot of good AI innovation,” Nazari said. “Now the question is how do we harness all that innovation into product offerings. That’s what my role is.”

The operating model Nazari described will include AI architecture, data pipelines, compliance requirements and maturity assessments to give Amentum an enterprise-level view of where its AI initiatives stand and where they need to go.

An AI advisory council will help manage governance, prioritizing initiatives against external demand and internal resource constraints.

Nazari’s role and the company’s focus on AI also reflect Amentum’s journey as it seeks to move higher up the food chain through internal investments in technology, people and partnerships.

Amentum has worked with OpenAI for two years and also has relationships with Google, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and other smaller AI companies. The goal is to match the right tools to the customer’s needs, Nazari said.

Nazari previously worked for Amentum on several initiatives involving robotics, automation and AI at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. In total, Nazari said he’s been working with AI since 2012 and has seen its capabilities grow firsthand.

Over the last several months, the growth of AI capabilities have exceeded his expectations.

"Since October or November, the reasoning in the models is beyond what I thought it would be," he said.

A big reason for the improvement are new tools that can connect the AI models to workflows.

“Now there's a whole ecosystem of tools behind them that allow you to connect the reasoning capabilities of these models to real world use cases,” he said.

When talking about some early priorities for the new job, Nazari goes back to those grassroots AI efforts by Amentum employees.

“They’re working with their customers and providing them with what they need,” he said. “But what’s missing is the ability to put that into an enterprise-wide system that allows us to reuse it. That’s what we are going to be enabling.”