CIA's first CTO Nand Mulchandani prepares for Trump administration

In April 2022, the CIA decided to right-click Nand Mulchandani and appoint him as its first chief technology officer. To the CIA, this looks good. Marchandani served as chief technology officer and acting director of the Defense Department's Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, a rarity in Washington. Before becoming a government employee, he co-founded and served as CEO of a string of Bay Area companies with names that had an almost comical spin to Silicon Valley: Oblix, Determina, OpenDNS and ScaleXtreme, each owned by a tech giant (Oracle , Oracle, VMware, Cisco and Citrix respectively).

Mulchandani may soon be surrounded by other founders and technologists as the Trump administration sweeps Washington with powerful advisers like Elon Musk.

We recently spoke with Mulchandani about this shift, its likely impact, and whether he wants to be a part of it. That's a lingering question because Mulchandani was not hand-picked by the president and because his boss, CIA Director William Burns, is resigning and will be replaced by someone from Decker John Ratcliffe, a former congressman from South Texas and President-elect Trump’s director of national intelligence. during Trump’s first term.

The following content has been edited for length.

What conversations are currently taking place before the Trump administration takes office?

The overall picture is that no one thinks there will be huge changes in technology and China. When Director Burns joined, his focus, direction, and emphasis on the agency was essentially great power competition. The way we like to talk about it is, obviously, dynamic warfare, which is conventional combat, and what's going on in the world all the time. But the next generation of competition is economic competition, and its core is technological competition. So the way he's setting strategic priorities for the agency is basically focusing on China and, again, turning to technology. As a result, major organizational changes he made include the launch of two new mission centers in 2021, one focused on China and the other on transnational and technological threats, and the subsequent creation of the CTO position. Let’s be honest…these are probably still going to be priorities for any new administration…

Clearly, we've been hearing a lot about DOGE and Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy's plans to shrink government—or at least offer their suggestions on how to shrink government. Has anyone in the Musk camp talked to anyone from the CIA? Jared Birchall, the head of the Musk family office, is reportedly talking to State Department candidates.

I can't talk about the specific presidential transition that's going on across the administration. What I can talk about – although this is not a comment on DOGE itself, but one of the key themes that we have been driving – is technology support for government and government processes… and the use of artificial intelligence and other components for our work Bring precision and scale. Activity. So I can't comment specifically on what they are trying to achieve. Is it the cost? Is it deploying technology at scale? Our focus is on all of the above… I mean, it would be crazy not to really focus on that at scale, and we're focusing on that.

In any transformation, there will be people trying to assess what they should prioritize. What do you think those priorities should be at the CIA?

Some questions will always remain. One is our focus on data insights, I know this sounds like buzzword bingo, but especially AI – deploying it (the right way should be a priority). If we had a whiteboard, what I would draw for you is the data funnel that exists and is growing in the world. As an intelligence agency, we're very, very hungry for data, whether it's human intelligence collection, electronic intelligence, geographic intelligence…that's the core of the intelligence service. The problem is that funnels and the scope, size and scale of data are growing every day, and you can always find more data to clean and bring in – some of it good, some of it junk. As this channel grows indefinitely, we need to continually restructure our infrastructure, systems, and applications…

The second one (has to do with) the growing side of defense technology and the idea that disruptive Silicon Valley companies are now leaning into military technology and national security and providing us with products and services. This trend is an important one that we continue to support.

Another big (related) initiative that we've been running and have scaled is: How do we significantly lower the barrier to use of commercial technology? This is what we call the inbound arc. The flip side is, how do we actually plan for our needs? So as a spy agency, as an intelligence agency, we are not culturally comfortable talking to the outside world about our problems, problem sets, initiatives, strategic things; Traditionally, we've been very quiet or very cautious about this sort of thing. Obviously we have to keep our work confidential, but we have another program now that we're going to launch in the next month or so where we're going to have very direct conversations with investors, venture capitalists and startups[about those needs]…rather than just having a tactical focus on procurement or acquisitions or whatever.

Speaking of venture capital, what do you personally think of someone like Marc Andreessen, who advises President-elect Trump on hiring? Obviously, he's a very smart guy, but sometimes the skill set isn't transferable to other industries.

I'd say that's not in line with my pay grade. I mean, I know a lot of people like that, and they're obviously very smart. I'll give you my personal experience – obviously I can't advise the president directly on non-technical matters. But what ends up happening is, as a former CEO, as a businessman, what I talk about a lot in our leadership organizations is the business model. My computer science degree hopefully qualifies me to talk about (technology). Another part of the experience that I bring is running these businesses and making business decisions, and my sense is that that experience and perspective is very valuable in Washington. I sometimes feel like in government we don't often talk about business models and how to actually run things efficiently, how to scale them, how technology disrupts business models, and how to enable new business models. In many projects that I bring on or work on, I always try to start with this: How is our business model changing at the CIA? As a human intelligence organization in the world of technology, the world of artificial intelligence, the world of great power competition, the hard target areas where we continue to operate, what does the CIA's business model look like in five areas, and where does it look like 10, 20 years from now? change?

You are not a political appointee. If you had the choice, would you rather stay or are you ready to return to Silicon Valley? I know you've been traveling from coast to coast for the past five years.

This is a discussion I have almost every day with my wife and kids. In fact, I'm in the East Bay (San Francisco) right now, which is where we live. My wife already has her career. Our kids are settled. We have relatives nearby. So I was commuting almost every week to Washington or wherever else the agency and the Department of Defense (before that) sent me or needed me. I have to be honest with you, the miles are showing now…

I think the broader issue that's still concerning is that there aren't enough Silicon Valley people in Washington, D.C., and that's something that I'm personally very concerned about. When I look around Washington, D.C., I can count on one hand the number of people who have been in a position like mine, which means they have deep roots in Silicon Valley. This is a big commitment, especially for people with children and families.

Can you foresee a day when the CIA will establish a second center on the West Coast?

Currently, we are settled in our headquarters (Langley, VA). But if they essentially bring some new ideas to this administration and they want more tech people to be involved, who knows?