This is an excerpt from an article that originally appeared on the Potomac Officers Club website. Read the full article here >

Potomac Officers Club began quarter two of the year with the timely, mission-focused 2026 Digital Transformation Summit. The event, held on Wednesday, April 22 at the Hilton McLean in Virginia, was a hub for in-depth discussions of how industry and government are partnering to use technology to make their efforts more efficient, exacting and explainable. Keynotes from influential leaders at the Departments of War and Transportation anchored the event while panel sessions examined AI, mission engineering, case management and much more…

Trust and Transparency Are Key to Better Emerging Tech Use

Trust and transparency was a recurrent theme throughout the 2026 Digital Transformation Summit: people won’t use emerging technologies if they can’t trust the information and results they produce.

Greg Touhill, Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute director for CERT, wants models that are transparent: where did the training data come from and how was the algorithm pulled together?

“I want transparency, where I know that capability was secure by design and I have some measure of understanding whether it’s efficient and secure,” Touhill said. “Is this machine capability giving me the right answer and drawing the right conclusion? Has it been trained right and red-teamed? Is it trustworthy and worth the risk?”

Another panelist said trust and transparency are essential for achieving decision advantage with human-machine teaming. If a staffer wants to move at real-time speed and make a decision using human-machine teaming, he or she needs to both trust, and be able to validate, the information he or she receives.

“Being able to know explainability: how it arrived at that, what resources it used,” said Rob Gordon, OMNI chief technology officer. “How can I get this info, process it at the speed of need for warfighting and have an accurate and understandable view of [the AI’s confidence]? It’s really hard and you’ll never get people to use it if they can’t trust it.”

This is an excerpt from an article that originally appeared on the Potomac Officers Club website. Read the full article here >