CGI Federal, DLA team up to test quantum and agentic AI for logistics

CGI Federal has signed an applied research agreement with the Defense Logistics Agency and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville to explore use cases around agentic artificial intelligence and quantum computing.

For this partnership, they will together to improve warehouse management and supply chain resilience.

The Quantum Pathfinder initiative will start with three focus areas: dynamic smart-warehouse orchestration, reverse logistics and disposition, and inventory positioning for contested environments.

Exactly what the work will tackle is still open. CGI said specific use cases will be jointly selected in the coming months, and the effort is expected to expand over the next fiscal year.

Victor Foulk, CGI Federal's vice president of emerging technologies, characterized the effort as a long-haul research play rather than a product rollout.

"Quantum computing will not arrive as a single product launch; it will arrive as a series of hard research problems solved against real mission constraints," Folulk wrote in a LinkedIn post. “Our ambition is practical: help a distribution center absorb a bad day, put returned assets to better use, and preserve warfighter readiness when a port, supplier or supply route becomes unavailable.”

CGI announced the research agreement at Quantum World Congress, where it also announced a strategic alliance with D-Wave Quantum. On the AI side, the company has a collaboration agreement with Amazon Web Services.

CGI will host the Quantum Pathfinder work at its onshore delivery center in Knoxville, Tennessee.

That ties it to Tennessee's broader push to build a quantum hub around the university and the Knoxville region's national lab research base. UT officials said the partnership will run through the Knoxville Quantum Accelerator and support the Tennessee Quantum Initiative.

CGI plans to share briefings, benchmark summaries and findings through publications and industry events as the research progresses.