How to Become a Procurement Champion with Will Roberts

Bonnie Evangelista [00:00:04]:
My name is Bonnie Evangelista. I'm here with Will Roberts. I'm with the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office. Will, can you introduce yourself and tell us who you work for?

Will Roberts [00:00:14]:
Sure. I'm Will Roberts. I was the acquisition lead of the Joint AI center or the DOD back in the day. I had the privilege of bringing you on the team back in the.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:00:25]:
So will's my former boss, but I am privileged to call you a friend now. And even though you have since left the government and you're working with Asia government. That's right.

Will Roberts [00:00:36]:
Yeah, it's a great gig.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:00:39]:
You are one of the few people in my career who have opened up, I would say, my mind to new and different ways of thinking. And when I came on board and we started this trade winds thing, I had already been doing some things in the rapid acquisition space, I would say, and I didn't think there was anywhere else you could go. And then you wanted us to go even further, and now you're doing it with ASI Education. And I was hoping you could talk to us a little bit about that and some of the themes or the messaging that you're hoping to promote and inspire practitioners like me to do more of, or to again reach their full potential in the seats we're sitting in as contracting and acquisition professionals.

Will Roberts [00:01:28]:
Yeah, sure. So I'll backtrack a little bit as a foundation for ASI education because it really started in the workforce. I've been 17 plus years in DoD acquisition, and toward the end I realized, well, especially with emerging technology like AI, we really needed not only a reskilling of the acquisition workforce, but a complete attitude sort of adjustment or change within the acquisition workforce. And I'll just use the contracting offices in particular. So really, and that attitude change had to do with the fact that I think this profession, the contracting officers, is one of the most historically important professions with delivering emerging tech to the government. And that's because we buy all of this stuff and we historically have, and it's cool to see history. This is Something I mentioned in the hearing. It's cool to look at us, history really, as a series of business transactions, even back before the founding of the nation.

Will Roberts [00:02:31]:
You can look at in the Revolutionary War this back and forth with contractors, this need. We've provide the connections between the service to the mission, but it's industry that always provided the stuff, and the contracting officer then became that deal maker. And it was really important for the contracting officers to realize how important their job is, but also to realize this is such an exciting and complex job. And I didn't see that type of realization in my career field. There were some, like yourself, that we got the zeal, we knew our jobs were cool and that it wasn't just the paper contract that you're signing that defines what you're doing, but the agreement between the two parties. And this thing that you're going to do, that that piece of paper is only just kind of like the receipt of the fun you're having. So the cool thing about going into ASI was that we were trying to figure out maybe different ways of letting the workforce know how important they are and then teaching them some core modern acquisition principles.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:03:38]:
And there's two things I want to cut. You got me thinking about. One is we've talked about before, how do we help people understand they're the hero story. And I think that's what you're describing. Like contracting officers are heroes, and like you said, throughout history, they've done some heroic things to deliver some amazing capability to where it needs to go. Any thoughts or comments on that as well?

Will Roberts [00:04:07]:
Yeah, you don't even have to make a stretch to the workforce to kind of connect the dots. You are like, if you do this thing, then this will lead to this, and this will lead to this, and then 50 people later, something cool happens. They're really connected to that pivotal agreement between the companies. So they're actually part of the history making, so you don't even have to make something up. And I think part of helping Them realize that is connecting them to the bigger world of what they're contributing. You know, we're the largest buyer in the world as the federal government. The DOD is the largest buyer within the federal government. And so with such a pivotal role, I think it's easy to lose perspective of how important your job is when you're just mired by all the regulations and the taskers that come down.

Will Roberts [00:04:58]:
So especially if you don't necessarily have a leadership that shields you from a lot of the pressures from above to give you reports and taskers, you're going to have to do a little bit of that. But if the workforce is so bogged down with the paperwork, then that becomes their whole nine to five job. There's no way they're going to see the forest for the trees and there's no way they're going to appreciate actually what they do, and they're never going to make a connection between what they're doing at their desk and the actual mission.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:05:26]:
Yeah, and they can't even take time for themselves to learn a new skill.

Will Roberts [00:05:30]:
Right.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:05:31]:
That sucks. The other thing I wanted to highlight about what you're doing in terms of, I mean, you're saying, yeah, we're hoping to teach these things, but you do it in a very, I would say, unconventional way. And you use a lot of humor, maybe even corny humor. I don't know if that's a fair statement or not to, I think, break down some walls and help people, maybe be open up to either a hard conversation or a candid conversation or not even a complex topic, but like, kind of the myth busting in our field. How did that come to fruition for you? Sure, because, again, it always starts with something, and you could have easily pitched, I would say, a more traditional idea or strategy, but you didn't.

Will Roberts [00:06:24]:
Well, and it's usually called terrible humor. So I'm glad that it's been promoted to corny. I'll take that. Yeah, it's pretty bad contract jokes, but I'll first say that I have really good management at ASI government because we're a 30 year consulting firm. So there's a professional aspect, of course, to what ASI government does. So this was a little bit of a deviation, and another deviation was just offering so much of our consulting for free in YouTube. And that's one thing that Tim, the president of ASI, wanted to do. So we're very mission focused and we want to make sure that a lot of this stuff is just offered in a channel.

Will Roberts [00:07:06]:
But it's hard to just offer a channel of training and no one's going to watch it if it's just a PowerPoint slide after PowerPoint Slide. So we were trying to figure out, how can you take this really good substantive acquisition information and deep fry it for human consumption? So we're like, well, if we make it entertaining enough, can we get the workforce to just enjoy watching it and then put those nuggets in there that are kind of entertaining but also just really valuable pieces of information. And it's morale building, too. So I remember even when I was a contracting officer, I would write, and this is really corny, but I would write, like, procurement knock knock jokes and procurement jokes. And then I'd just pass them out through email or something. You could tell it's light hearted, it lifts the mood, it provides that kind of morale. Sometimes it's more fun, too, when you point out the elephants in the room. If there's something in your job that everyone just can't stand, make a joke out of it.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:08:05]:
Our team is really big on meme challenges.

Will Roberts [00:08:08]:
Yes.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:08:09]:
So those are super fun right now, but I think it's a good example or anecdote of what you're talking about.

Will Roberts [00:08:13]:
Exactly. Yeah. And the more the memes kind of touch a nerve of something that's really bothering everyone, the more you just kind of let loose. There's a pressure valve that comes out. So a lot of our stuff is that, and we have rules that we just established for our videos. And one of our rules, we don't want to be mean to anybody in the profession. So we do poke fun at the acquisition profession, but it's in a way where we're hoping to just point out those elephants so that the people saying, oh, yeah, that drives me crazy, too. And really with the ultimate goal of helping us all be better at our jobs.

Will Roberts [00:08:48]:
So that's done in an encouraging way and really to create that pressure valve of saying, I mean, we have a video called Five reasons industry hates you. We have videos where we have a contracting officer character that reoccurs who's just really nerdy. He has a sign in his cubicle that says, don't talk to me. So he's just this contracting officer that he doesn't want to talk to anybody.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:09:08]:
But I mean, if anybody hears that and they start laughing, it's funny because that's happened either a number of times.

Will Roberts [00:09:18]:
And if they're not that way, they know some people that way.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:09:21]:
So I feel like it's bringing awareness or maybe even conversation. Like today, maybe we should be talking about that on what we can do better to have relationships and whatnot. Are you doing a lot of the content creation and the ideating behind what themes, like what messages, and then how you're overlaying the humor.

Will Roberts [00:09:48]:
So we've grown a little bit. It started with just three of us. We have a partner AC innovation Group who came on and is working that. And it just started with three. So I would write the scripts. We had a couple of us come up with the ideas, and we did have some general topics that we wanted to just have our videos fall under. One was the public private relationships. Another was being a procurement champion.

Will Roberts [00:10:14]:
So that whole topic was just how contracting professionals can just be better workers and be really better assets for their nation and then also have a really good work life balance. Like, you don't have to really serve your nation well and also be a disservice to your family. There's ways of creating that balance. There's other videos that we have that are tailored toward industry, like small businesses, to help them kind of understand a little bit about how the government works. And then we have some videos just, it's a little bit more of on the regulation side, explaining some far concepts. We did one on OTS, which I called you before we did the video to get some tips. THere's a quote I really like that we used for our marketing material. And it's creativity is taking the mundane and finding the marvelous out of it.

Will Roberts [00:11:06]:
So finding the marvelous out of the mundane. And so you have shows like the office, how it really took that something seemingly boring and by making fun of something boring, not making fun of, but just by pulling out that boring thing. And it's something that's incredibly relatable, hopefully relatable to the profession. Something we can all laugh at and. Yeah, can be entertaining.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:11:28]:
Yeah. What other topics or themes you're hoping to inspire? Maybe like what are some things either in the queue or that you're thinking about where you really want to have more conversation? Bring more conversation to the table for a professional.

Will Roberts [00:11:45]:
So we are concerned a lot in our company about workforce shortage among contracting offices across the agencies and that just the workforce problem and really good talented government professionals either leaving to join industry or just not sticking around for whatever reason. And really whether these offices are cultivating the next world class professional. Some videos coming up that we're going to be filming in November will be around that. Some change management, but really leading the leaders. How to be a leader that really gets the most out of your team and make them those fruit bearing trees that actually want to bear fruit for you.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:12:30]:
Yeah, you mentioned how to be a procurement champion. You've also written about that as well. What are a couple things that are maybe the couple most, I won't say most important, but the ones that you think people should really take to hard are on how to be a procurement champion.

Will Roberts [00:12:48]:
Yeah, I'll say that in order to find the topics, the first thing we did which was the easiest, was just take old articles and turn them into videos. So a lot of our early videos are just articles we wrote and put on LinkedIn. But there's five skills to be a procurement champion and that we're actually presenting at UCMS. One of the most important skills is just kind of self motivated knowledge growth. And that is just if you really want to be a champion and procurement be an asset. The mandatory training is good, training that is available is good, but you are going to have to really take control of your own career development. Oftentimes, depending on the management that you have, you will be doing that despite maybe management not wanting you to do that sometimes, right. They're not going to encourage you to take an hour of your day every morning, which is what I recommend to just stop and just learn.

Will Roberts [00:13:48]:
And one thing I always encourage is the best way to do it is go on WifcOn.com, learn federal contracting, go on for a morning. It's treated as like an exercise routine. An hour every morning, go in and then read one protest per day. If you actually build up a regimen where you're reading one protest per day, and WIFCON is great because they just do all the protests. So you're reading the newest protest, but if you do that, you'd be amazed at your growth because protests, different from regulations, is there's an actual story involved. So there's a use case of something that actually happened.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:14:22]:
Right.

Will Roberts [00:14:23]:
And so you can follow that story and then learn just all of this knowledge about how rules are applied.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:14:30]:
I would offer as well, whether it's procurement or not, you could take an hour and just learn something. Yes, AI or how to use an AI tool or anything that maybe you find interest in. Not just contracting or acquisition type topics, but if you are in that growth mindset, I think goodness. There's nothing but goodness that can come from that.

Will Roberts [00:15:03]:
There are so many resources and it's almost like a data dump of what's out there. And actually, most importantly, take an hour every morning and watch a defense Mavericks podcast and an ASI education video and then do the other stuff. But yeah, another skill is the soft skills, which I call human skills. And this isn't taught a lot about with an acquisition or contracting professional, but just the need to who I've seen rise in the ranks a lot in procurement. And again, this five skills to be a procurement champion really is for those people who just want to climb the ladder or really excel and advance in their career. So the people that I've seen advance the most are not those who necessarily know everything about federal acquisition regulations, but those who have particular set of soft skills or human skills. And I list three in the video. One is humility.

Will Roberts [00:16:06]:
So this ability to work with people in a team, but also be very humble about it, humble about the knowledge that you have, which if you're a procurement champion, you're just going to be a rock star. Your knowledge is going to keep growing, but if you stay humble, then you'll be effective. Rock stars aren't arrogant. So there's humility, there's tact. And tact is really an issue with it goes more toward diplomacy. So as you become a procurement champion, as you start coming up with ideas, a lot of those ideas are going to go against the grain. They're going to be ideas that as you build your knowledge, as you build your critical thinking, which is another skill, you're going to start thinking of game changing ways that you can change your office and as you advance even regulation, and that's not going to be looked upon favorably with a lot of people. So your ability to handle those relationships with tact and humility, but really figure out how to navigate those conversations, will also help you advance.

Will Roberts [00:17:00]:
So it's just that realization that so much of your success takes, that. I don't want to say politics, but it takes your ability to navigate relationships of whole bunch of different personalities that are going to be in your career field.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:17:14]:
I remember before I came to DoD, this was five years ago, I was working in a civilian agency, and I would call it a Team America like forum, where we took an hour as a team and didn't do any work. And we just talked either about a protest or a lot of times it was Harvard Business Journal articles and we would just discuss. And one of them, I don't remember the title, but it talked about the difference between the likable dummy and they didn't use that word. But do you want the person who's likable and maybe isn't the technically smart person, or do you want the jerk who is super smart? And that was a moment for me, which is what I think draws to what you're talking about. Because in everything you just described in terms of how to be a procurement champion, you didn't talk about knowing the most about the far or having the technical skills that maybe people are perceived they have to have to get to a certain level in our career fields and whatnot. And I think there's a foundation there you have to have, and you have to have a competency, and then the rest of it is being a human. I like that. Being a human and learning how to work as a team.

Will Roberts [00:18:40]:
Yeah. I think kids would learn more from Mr. Rogers than school about how to succeed in life. Just being a good person. And I didn't put this, but just being agreeable, too agreeable, doesn't mean you're a pushover. There is such a thing, I think, as being an agreeable disruptor. Being someone who challenges the status quo, makes changes, but does it in a way that people will want to. It's going to be really hard for you to find supporters.

Will Roberts [00:19:13]:
If you're not a disruptor that also has agreeable tendencies, where you're figuring out ways that the thing that you're trying to do is going to help the person who's resisting it, or how to turn that person who's resisting it into a convert because you need them to help you, which is another way to get stuff done, is to let the people who are resisting it know you can't do this without them. That's a great tactic.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:19:39]:
Yeah. I like the idea of living in a world where we have enough competency and enough, I don't know if it's competence or there's a knowing that has to happen where you can be a disruptor because you know either the status quo is not working, or you know that this strategy or this pathway you're going down is likely not the most effective, or wE're not going to reach our end state that we're looking for. And you have enough, like I said, because of that knowing, and because you have some of the skills you described, you're willing to raise your hand and be, we're saying disruptor, but just even having the courage to say something, despite whatever your consequences are in your circumstance, I would love to live in a world where that is more common.

Will Roberts [00:20:36]:
Yeah. And I think that's why a lot of disruptor personalities rise a lot in their careers, because groupthink is real, and sometimes you wish you had had somebody in the room to say, this is bad, guys, let's shut this down. But we all just agreed, and so it's good to have that. What's interesting, though, is a lot of the disruptive personalities is they underestimate the ability of people to react because their pride is getting stepped on. So I think the really great people are people who look at the aggressive disruptor personality who's even lashing out at you and have the humility to say, you know what? I know what you're saying to me. I'm going to forget all that, because what you're saying is actually, you just said something that's actually pretty valuable. But I don't know if most people are like that. So the risk that those aggressive disruptors run when they're kind of insultingly disruptive toward the status quo is that they're going to be stepping on a lot of people on a lot of pride, and they're not sure if those people are going to listen or just not be able to recover from what you just said.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:21:44]:
And I think the pride I would also offer a lot of emotion tied to that and identity tied to that. Potentially. One of the most common comments when we talk about AI is, well, if AI is going to do my job now, what am I going to do? And I think there's some emotion tied to that, and maybe it could be fear and whatnot. Whatever it is, it could be any scenario we're talking about or hypothetical. Can you, with humility, take a step back and say, let's remove the, like, just for a second? Let's, like, play this out and. And understand, is this true or not true, or could it be true? And just creating space for that type of conversation, I think, would be a huge step in the right direction.

Will Roberts [00:22:39]:
I got to say, I loved being in a room where there was someone like that in the room, and there were even high level people in the room, and we were all going toward a certain. Maybe the best was when someone was briefing someone high up about something, and then one person just took the rock and threw it at the glass house and it shattered. One of the things about that, though, is that a lot of times if you do that, you're doing it just to challenge the group, but you don't know the background or the foundation of why that came to be or what you're challenging came to be. One of the things, like what you mentioned that makes people upset about that is they put their whole life into this thing that's now being shattered by a rock. And so one of the most effective ways of being disruptor is not to criticize, but just ask why. And then usually just asking why just shatters the house anyway, because it can't be answered.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:23:39]:
Yeah. I like the idea of more contracting. I would offer both contracting and acquisition, but definitely be just because I'm a contracting person by trade, and that's the community I grew up in. But in particular, just removing that stigma or stereotype that this is a stale paper pusher type of job and taking ownership of it and making it. If you don't want to be the paper, don't be the paper pusher. Nothing's happening to you. There are opportunities and ways to make this more fun, be more creative. If you're looking at a workflow and you're like, why are we doing it that way? Maybe that's your calling, to raise your hand, throw the rock, and take some spears to the face and do something about it.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:24:45]:
Is there anything else from your perspective on how to help a practitioner like me take that step?

Will Roberts [00:24:54]:
Yeah. When it comes to contracting officers enjoying their job, my first question is, why not enjoy your job? If you're already doing this for 40 hours a week, why would you not try to make it fun? Even if it's the most boring job in the world, why not just try to make it fun for you and your team? But the fortunate thing is we don't even have to try much if we look too much into it, because there's a lot of ways that this profession can be really fun. And we talked about this idea of, it's contracting officers. They sign contracts, but if you look at your job as just a piece of paper with your signature on it, and that's what you're creating, then you're missing the underlying purpose of what you're actually doing. And this goes back to what we were talking about, about how history is one business transaction after another. What you're holding in your hand with the signature is really just a paper copy of this agreement that you created. And within the confines of this agreement, you are setting up a business relationship between you and the company to do this thing that's going to help your mission in some way, hopefully. And so that's what your job is.

Will Roberts [00:26:07]:
It's something that is put on paper just because it's formalized, but it's something that's more intangible. Your job is more of this intangible agreement between this company. And if you actually look at it that way, you'll start to do more intangible things, meaning that you'll stop resorting to paperwork, things that you can touch and read, and you'll start moving yourself toward that actual agreement, and then you'll start moving yourself toward, well, how do I create better agreements which will open you up to want to talk to companies more and want to do the aspects of your job that you may not have time to do because you're doing the paper. And that's what I think the biggest challenge right now in contracting offices today is there's some very high value things that they can be doing which would absolutely transform and reskill the workforce, but they can't, or they don't feel like they can because they're bogged down with the task orders or the taskers or the menial jobs.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:27:08]:
I do think that struggle is real. Yeah. You mentioned workforce is getting smaller, budgets are getting larger, and I feel like it still falls on the same people to get the contracts out, spend the money, and that's a reality. We do need to, I think, have.

Will Roberts [00:27:27]:
More conversation about, and I'll say that I've been there too. I've had a lot of different leaders who had different opinions on that type of work. And I would get beat up a lot by management sometimes by going out to an industry event and just talking to companies, whereas they wanted me maybe to be back and doing some of these taskers. I'm not calling for insubordination. You got to do those things, but you also have to. And I know this is hard, but I'll say firsthand experience. I had to force this into my work life despite the resistance for me not to, for management. I just did it anyway.

Will Roberts [00:28:11]:
Because you're not doing your career any favors by continuing to do one tasker after another. At the end of your career, you're not going to look back at your career and say, I'm so glad I got those taskers in in time.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:28:25]:
I feel like I'm a constant slave to my email inbox. And so I've been thinking about how to think about it differently in terms of if I don't read the email or I don't respond to the email, what is the consequence of that? Because if I want to spend my time doing a session like this or like you said, going to an industry event, the email is not getting responded to. But what's the value proposition? Am I getting more value out of responding to emails or something else? That's been like a real literal this past couple of weeks? I've been having those kinds of thought experiments in my head.

Will Roberts [00:29:06]:
There are so many in the email back. Yeah, that was my biggest challenge. And someone even told me about, I don't know if I should say this on recording, but someone told, have you heard about the purge?

Bonnie Evangelista [00:29:17]:
Like, after so many days, just hit the delete button.

Will Roberts [00:29:19]:
Everything. Longer than a month, just delete everything. Because if it's important enough, they'll write you back for my email last month and you'll say, oh, so I'm not necessarily condoning that, but it is one of the biggest, I think, sources of stress on the workforce right now is unread emails. And I feel like this is just my personal opinion. I feel like we should have really lower our expectations on our fellow coworkers on responding to email. There are now so many ways, and this is what frustrates me a little bit, there are so many ways to get a hold of someone you need to get a hold of, rather than saying, well, I've been trying to get a hold of you, but has my email been in your inbox for, why didn't you pick up the phone?

Bonnie Evangelista [00:30:06]:
Yeah, in a former life, we would call this leadership by email, where you assume or expect there's an expectation that if I put it in an email, action will be taken or something.

Will Roberts [00:30:18]:
And actually, the email thing is a good comparison of the different types of the two different types of procurement. Like I think a procurement champion or someone that's really focused on that relationship and getting things done and looking at. So the vision of the far really is to deliver the best value product to the customer in a timely basis. And if you really have that as your vision, as your North Star, if you're not hearing anything after the second email, you're picking up the phone. And there are so many professionals that I've worked with who, that was it for them. If they didn't get that email back, even if they were part of the process of getting the contract out, they'd say, all right, balls in their court. That's a fourth skill in the procurement champion, is just having the mission focus. And it's surprising how, it's not surprising because we just talked about how there's so many parts of your task just take you away from being able to think about your job.

Will Roberts [00:31:18]:
So unsurprisingly, not a lot of contracting professionals maybe understand what their mission is, which could be a problem. So one thing I always encourage for every contracting professional is take your mission and print it out and memorize it. And if you're working in a component of the Air Force, print out the DOD mission first and then the Air Force mission and then the mission of your particular Air Force component. So memorize all three, and then every single thing that comes your way, whether it's a requirements package or anything, any project, first sit and then align it with your mission and just say, how is this going to enhance the mission? Because then you'll start unpeeling that and saying, well, then why does it need to be delivered at this time? And then you'll start getting a sense of the urgency and you'll get a sense of your place in actually making this thing happen. So what, your contribution to the mission becomes real, and then you'll start picking up the phone and calling when you don't get those answers because you're going to be actually moving toward making the mission happen, not just signing a piece of paper.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:32:20]:
Well, and I think it's worth saying when you're saying, oh, after I don't get a response, I'm going to pick up the phone. I would offer. It's more, maybe you realize not just you have to do something different. But maybe I need to build a relationship that doesn't exist there because they're not responding to me. And I think that's we're full circle where we started. We all realize we are humans, and.

Will Roberts [00:32:50]:
There were times in the Jake, we would be getting in the car and going to the mark center or wherever, bearing gifts and ready to get on our knees and beg, but really just strike up that relationship. We're like, okay, this requires face to face because we have a log jam in the process.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:33:07]:
Yeah. Do you mind if we talk about your congressional hearing?

Will Roberts [00:33:12]:
Yeah.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:33:13]:
Give us a 62nd rundown on who you were testifying, what hearing it was, and what the topic was.

Will Roberts [00:33:23]:
Yeah. So AI has been a big focus for Congress, and Gary Peters with the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee had reached out. So I talked a little bit about just the role of the acquisition professional in artificial intelligence. And so there was a hearing about acquisition and procurement in AI. And what they're really trying to do is the AI Training act was just passed in October. The DOD is exempt, but it's for civilian agencies. But the DOD has AI literacy, so both of those tailored toward acquisition professionals. And so they wrote both of those acts.

Will Roberts [00:34:01]:
And here's the real challenge, is the act is there, and now it's just up to the executive branch to interpret it and then do the training. So my feedback to that committee was initially, before I went to the hearing, I wasn't sure if we were going to train our acquisition professionals in compliance with the act in the way that they may have intended. So I came in the hearing. My biggest point was that if we really believe that artificial intelligence is going to be a technology that takes over not only our daily lives, but the way we accomplish every mission in the federal government, which I believe that's true and definitely within the next ten years, if we really think that's true, then AI is not a niche. It can't be just this special expertise, and it needs to be mandatory training for every single acquisition intern coming into the workforce. So that was my hearing. And it really requires, as you know, because we're not just talking about AI to buy AI, it requires you to know how to buy digital technology. And that really requires a reskilling of the contracting workforce, something that we've been training on for a little bit of the past decade.

Will Roberts [00:35:32]:
But because of AI, the need for it has become more real. And we're not there yet, but we could be. There needs to be a much greater prioritization of AI, acquisition, training and the DOD workforce, I would say nothing short of mandatory for everybody.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:35:50]:
Are you still teaching at ASI?

Will Roberts [00:35:52]:
Yeah, we do AI acquisition trainings, and we've been doing a lot with civilian agencies, which has been fun because it's different for. It is, yeah, it's. I mean, I'm DOD background, so it was really cool to see. So the DOD does have some unique challenges, but it was cool to see, because we also work with clients who are doing AI stuff, too. And it was cool to see the progress that a lot of civilian agencies are doing with artificial intelligence. And in some ways, it's a lot easier than the DOD. The data is easier to use because it's unclassified data. A lot of civilian agencies will tend to pick much narrower solutions, like some kind of AI capability attached to a business system that just takes the manpower hours down from months to days.

Will Roberts [00:36:49]:
So I think a danger of the Department of Defense because of the funding and because of maybe pressures from above, is to go big fast. And what I've seen in civilian agencies, a lot is many will start narrow and small and then expand out or try to scale or expand out and scale. Because I think one thing that we miss is you're not just prototyping the AI. When you do something, you're prototyping your ability to work as a balanced team and do an iterative, agile process. I mean, you're actually prototyping the way the government does this for the first time. So if you make the AI really simple, if you make the capability super narrow, very simple, limited data sets, just a simple architecture, and then you can focus on prototyping. Well, how is the team going to work? Are we going to bring the testing and evaluator in? Do we have the money person talking to the lawyers? Does the PM talk to the contracting person? So if you focus more on prototyping your team and then iteratively improving that, then you can start in pace with the sophistication of your team, you can start getting more sophisticated with your AI, too.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:37:58]:
Yeah, I think maybe the textbook term for that is how are you going to do change management?

Will Roberts [00:38:02]:
Yes.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:38:05]:
That is super cool. Anything else from the hearing that you think is insightful for us to think?

Will Roberts [00:38:15]:
I mean, I will say that the hearing confirmed, and of course, that was also during the week that Mark Zuckerberg was there and Elon Musk. It was like AI week, like AI Woodstock for Congress. Like all the big people were there and the little, you know, I think it's real right now, Congress is looking at it and if you're in the acquisition workforce right now and you're not even touching AI, you will. And one of the best ways to get ahead in your career, maybe this is the 6th, we'll do six procurement skills, is to really get your knowledge up on AI because you can be in a position to help others and actually be ahead of the curve. Because there's going to be a time where every single acquisition professional is going to need to understand what this technology does. It's too powerful and creates too big of an impact for it not to be applied to almost every mission we have in the government. So that's my tip for the acquisition professionals, contracting professionals learn AI. It's going to help you out in the future.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:39:24]:
And I'll add to that tip some more free advice for people. I would say there's a lot of free tech available. You don't have to take a class. You can just use free AI tools that we have at our fingertips and just use them and see what happens. And that's another hack to taking your growth mindsets pillar. I would say take an hour, take.

Will Roberts [00:39:51]:
A tool, figure out how to CDAO, take an AI literacy class. Yeah.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:39:55]:
Okay, last question. And I've never asked anybody this question, but I think you're the best person to ask it for the first time. What does being a defense Maverick mean to you?

Will Roberts [00:40:08]:
Wow. Okay. I would say to me, a defense Maverick is being able to wield the skills that you have to be an incredibly effective person for your organization. So I think it would take knowledge, so you'd have to develop those skills. But then when you do that, that you're able to skillfully and with agility move in ways that actually gets you success for your mission. How's that?

Bonnie Evangelista [00:40:41]:
Yeah, perfect. Yeah. I would probably go back to taking the mundane and making it marvelous.

Will Roberts [00:40:48]:
I love it. That's even better.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:40:49]:
Yeah. That was a nice way of getting to that point.

Will Roberts [00:40:54]:
I'll say this too, the more marvelous you make something mundane, the less mundane you'll think it is and the more you'll actually start enjoying it, I think.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:41:05]:
Yeah. Thank you so much. Love our conversations and I appreciate you taking time to share some insights and wisdom with us.

Will Roberts [00:41:13]:
Absolutely. Thanks for having me close.