Future of Business: SAIC’s Toni Townes-Whitley on Leading Strategic Transformation

With more than $7 billion in annual revenue and 24,000 employees, SAIC provides engineering, digital, AI, and mission support to defense, space, intelligence, and civilian customers. CEOtook the helm a year ago, after stints as a senior executive at Microsoft, CGI Federal, and Unisys. She discusses her approach to strategic transformation at SAIC through fine tuning and employee upskilling, rather than wholesale change.

ADI IGNATIUS: Well, let’s talk about those four because, from the outside, it looks like you decided to move on practically everything. The product portfolio, the market strategy, the brand, the culture. How do you get buy-in across the company? How do you execute on so many different fronts? TONI TOWNES-WHITLEY: So when I talked about the hypothesis, Adi, that I came in. On the portfolio, obviously coming from a company like Microsoft, was super focused on our capabilities and where we were differentiated, and whether we were at scale. I found, I was so pleased to find, that we actually had clear differentiation in areas of what we would call digital engineering, secured data analysis, and operational AI. You mentioned AI.

ADI IGNATIUS: Yeah. It’s a really interesting example of public-private partnership. But I have to ask, how do you navigate a client base of government entities that are bureaucratic? They’re beholden to Congressional budget making, which isn’t always the smoothest thing in the world. With political turbulence, it can mean big swings in approach and policy, from one administration to another. That sounds like an incredible challenge.

ADI IGNATIUS: Yeah. Well, let me ask you more about culture. You talked about that’s something that you’re measuring as well. Tell me more. Are there specific actions that you’ve taken that are showing results — whether on a quantifiable, or on a quality basis? TONI TOWNES-WHITLEY: I can’t speak for all companies. I’ll say, at SAIC, we run an AI council. We bring all of the disciplines of AI, from our internal IT operation to our external innovation factory, every one of our functions, HR, legal, our finance function, and those that are client-facing. They all have representatives on an AI council that meets routinely to address issues of AI in the business. How we’re using AI for proposal development or recruiting or hiring.

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