NVIDIA GTC Washington, D.C. 2025 | Bob Venero, Future Tech & Travis Garriss, Northrop Grumman

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Bob Venero, Future Tech & Travis Garriss, Northrop Grumman

Bob Venero

CEO & Founder Future Tech Enterprise, Inc.

Travis Garriss

Chief Information & Digital Officer Northrop Grumman

In this NVIDIA GTC Washington, D.C. interview, theCUBE’s Savannah Peterson sits down with Bob Venero, chief executive officer of Future Tech, and Travis Garriss, chief information and digital officer at Northrop Grumman, to unpack a rapid, mission-first AI deployment built with NVIDIA, Future Tech, Dell and Northrop Grumman. Garriss details how the team moved from an initial NVIDIA call to standing up internal AI capability in Northrop Grumman’s data center in just three months – an unprecedented pace for a highly regulated environment – while Venero shares t... Read more

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What challenges are faced when innovating in a highly-regulated industry, and how has the partnership contributed to overcoming these challenges? add

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Bob Venero, Future Tech & Travis Garriss, Northrop Grumman

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>> Good afternoon, nerd fam, and welcome to beautiful Washington DC. We're here giving you exclusive coverage from NVIDIA GTC, one of the hottest tech conferences of the year. My name's Savannah Peterson. I'm very excited to be delighted by an old friend, Bob, and a new friend, Travis. Thank you both for spending the time today.

>> Thanks for having us. - It's pretty cool. It's buzzy.

>> It's hopping in here.

>> It's amazing. - Y'all had a really big announcement

>> with a lot of partners today.

>> Travis, why don't you open it up and tell us what happened today?

>> So, we've been partnering between NVIDIA, Future Tech, Dell, and with Northrop Grumman to try and drive AI capabilities internal. So often we'll go out and we'll procure something in the cloud, like everybody else, but we wanted to have some internal use case capability and the speed with which we did it, I think is the particular thing that was most exciting for us.

>> How fast did you do it? - From the phone call

>> that I got on the Key Bridge from NVIDIA of an opportunity to actually having initial capability in our data center, three months.

>> Oh, my gosh. - Yes. Yeah.

>> This would take years in the past, no offense

>> to everyone operating at that, but that's like nine months to a year, at least to get something off the ground, I would think. Yeah.

>> When you think about a highly-regulated industry, it can be challenging to innovate at pace and so-

>> Perhaps the most regulated, really. Yeah.

>> Very true. So, it typically is a challenge.

>> We're able to overcome that together, it's real exciting for us.

>> That is really exciting. Congratulations.

>> Thanks. - Bob, tell me

>> a little bit about the partnership.

>> You guys have been working together for a long time, right?

>> Long time. 29 years and a few hair follicles ago.

>> 29 years? - Yeah. Yeah, it's been-

>> That's a couple of tech evolutions.

>> Yeah, I've seen a lot of evolutions.

>> I'm trying to get back to the Commodore 64 for us old people who remember that, not you. But yeah, it's been a long time. And to Travis's point about the speed and the execution of what we did, a lot of people look at the systems integrators as this slow- moving aircraft carrier, and with-

>> Pun intended?

>> Yeah, with new leadership

>> and stuff, they're turning into a speedboat. And this is a perfect example of being able to take something from concept to design, to completion in three to four months is just unheard of in the market, and Northrop Grumman is leading that path big time.

>> That's awesome and in a pretty wild space. So, I love this. In my notes, I have here that this was mission-first innovation. Travis, can you tell me what that means?

>> Sure. When we think about what we deliver as a company, for me and as an IT leader, my job is to enable users and engineers, manufacturing floors, et cetera. But we have to always remember that the company is designed to deliver mission. So, that is how do people use our products in theater, in space at the bottom of the ocean, and we're trying to drive and taking advantage of AI and all of those areas. And so, when we think about building capability, it's not only to enable the development, but also the testing so that we can use those things in the practical application for how they would be actually out in the field.

>> Yeah, that's pretty cool. So, what is so special about combining Blackwell GPUs, Dell's PowerEdge? You've got a lot of partners on this project. Why does it make it possible to go so much faster now than it was before? Travis, I'll stay with you.

>> Generally, I would say that it actually would traditionally make it very difficult when you have a number of partners and I think-

>> Correct. Increased complexity.

>> Exactly, and a lot of perspectives, a lot

>> of different design theories and so on and so forth. In this particular case, I think what was unique was that everybody understood what we were trying to achieve. They understood what was necessary to do it. There was a lot of motivation, and I just think we're at a time where IT can move from simply an enabler to an accelerant or even a catalyst for business when you've got the right partners. So, it was really more about the right partnerships driving pace, as opposed to the wrong partnerships creating friction or delay.

>> And that is quite an evolution. Bob, I want to get your thoughts on this too. You've been a part of bringing together massive technology partners for decades.

>> Yes. - It seems like you're able to do it even quicker

>> and smoother than ever before. What sort of changes are you noticing? Is it technology-driven? Is it culture-driven? What's going on?

>> I think it's a combination of, right? The speed of technology is just amazing now. With AI, AI is helping drive additional technology solutions and launches that we would've seen take years, take months or days now, and it's kind of insane. And the complexity around bringing those companies together has become harder in the sense that you got to make sure you're not maybe bleeding edge, but you're cutting edge, and that those things will work together. And the key is one of the things that I've always learned this coming up in the technology world that I have, just because you have the best switch and the best hard drive and the best CPU and the best whatever, when you put them all together, does not necessarily mean you've got the best solution.

>> Oh, no. - So, ensuring that those parties work together,

>> and in this case with Lighthouse, the team knew mission, right? Travis set a direction and said, "Here's where we're going to go. Here's where we need to do it by and here's how we're going to do it. " And everybody got in line and said, "All right. Let's make it happen. " From 6:00 AM calls for people on the West Coast to 4: 00 PM stand-ups. And making sure that it was driven to an end result that, in my 29 years of working with Northrop Grumman, never seen it happen that quick. So, kudos to the teams.

>> That's impressive. - And to our partners, to be sure.

>> So, to be honest, I set an ambitious goal. I wasn't entirely sure we'd make it, but you set them and you try and be aggressive and the team really stepped up.

>> Yeah, they did great. - Those are the best goals though.

>> One of the we've been having lately on the news desk is some

>> of these MVPs aren't succeeding because people aren't thinking big enough. They're almost looking to see too much small step change versus what if we did disrupt everything within it and put ourselves on a different platform that allowed us to scale and be more agile moving forward. I mean, it's super exciting. So, we've talked a bit about the speed. Travis, give me some other tangible examples of the benefits that you've noticed internally since you've been able to execute this.

>> I think when we experience demands from our customers, it used to be that price was the most important thing. And then, quality was the next important thing. And then, pace could sort of linger. We're seeing a flip in the industry where pace is the most important attribute of how we go out and try and deliver. It yields things like MVPs as being acceptable and we're able to work through that. I think there's all kinds of other implications though for us as a company. Culturally, you mentioned. How do we get people thinking in faster revisions and faster improvements? How do we get people to have a little bit of tolerance for not quite perfect?

>> Yeah, for a little clunk? Yeah.

>> Exactly. Exactly. But let's wrestle through it together and in the aggregate we will be further along because we did. And so, for me, I love the cultural implication of the outcome. And whenever you can mix effort and then tie that to progress or to performance, I feel like that's a really strong lesson for us all to learn culturally together. So, it's helped reinforce that for us.

>> I love that. Do you feel like it's unlocking a little bit more creativity as the style kind of changes?

>> That's my hope. I think in the defense industry, our industry is built on hearing and listening to our customers, getting requirements and then responding to those. So, when you think about entrepreneurialism, you want to inject that as much as possible in your operating system internally, and that can yield incredible results because the talent is unbelievable.

>> It is. It is. You've always had a really fun team.

>> How do you keep the culture of innovation quick within Future Tech?

>> By continuing to make sure that we're empowering the teams to make decisions and bring ideas and concepts to the table, and to make sure that their voices are heard, and that's very important. Because look, I'm one brain and sometimes it's a half a brain, but it's those things where when you bring the right people together that really care about what they're trying to accomplish, and you give them the ability to do it, then they're going to drive and thrive in an environment that can move at speed now much better. And so, look, that's why our average tenure is 12 years now with the people at our company, which-

>> That's impressive. - ...

>> is awesome. And it was a lot higher before my CRO hired like 40 people last year. And so, you-

>> You're saying that like it's a bad thing, Bob.

>> My stats are affected.

>> Just give it a couple years, Bob.

>> Yeah, then we'll do that. - Yeah, you'll be great.

>> No, that's awesome.

>> I do think that it takes a different level of curiosity right now and agility than it has historically. You're not getting on the product roadmap for two years from now. You're getting on the product roadmap for 90 days from now or trying to figure out what's next. It's so exciting. So, Travis, talk to me a little bit about how the AI factory supports use cases like intelligence and mission simulation and operational decision making. I mean, these are pretty heavy, high-risk, high- value tasks. So, how does it work?

>> One of the things for us and one of the initial drivers for building this factory in the first place was to have the ability to control that internally. So, traditionally, we would go out to even a government- regulated cloud environment. We would procure a service and deliver a particular piece of AI to our customers internally, our engineers, our manufacturing floor. By having this factory internally, we can slice off individual pieces for particular use cases, manage authentication our own way, and then feed data to those use cases in protected ways. And so, you can use this in almost infinite creative approaches to address AI opportunity by marrying the right people with the right data and then the right technology. And you can slice that up as in whatever path you need that. So, that's, for us, that flexibility and that autonomy to do that and to scale to the future, not just to the specific need we have today is what's exciting for us.

>> It's the right Lego pieces, it sounds like.

>> It is. - It's a little more modular.

>> Exactly. - You can just build up what you need

>> and you're one of the people who always provides those.

>> Yeah. Because you can now take pieces and move them in

>> and out as things change,

>> versus caught up into a proprietary architecture, which is definitely a thing you want to avoid in today's speed of change and speed of technology.

>> Yeah. Yeah, definitely. So, since we're here at GTC, let's talk about NVIDIA just for a moment. How important is the partnership with them right now? It feels like everyone's talking about it. Bob, I'll start with you on this one.

>> Well, the $4 trillion market cap partnership that's there?

>> Yeah. - Yeah. Look, I always say

>> NVIDIA's the grandfather of AI. I mean they started with the chips and they're driving it that way. And Jensen's done an amazing job, that is one smart dude. He has vision out the wazoo and he's surrounded himself with great people. And some of the things that really help NVIDIA be a better company, in my opinion, is they drive based on end- goal missions. I don't know if you know this, but there is no commission for salespeople at NVIDIA. Nobody gets comped-

>> I did not know that. - ...

>> on sales. And when you change that dynamic, people are then out there to drive the culture of the value they don't have that proverbial, "Got to hit my quarterly number," at the end of the day.

>> Wow. Yeah, what a cultural shift.

>> And that drives, "I'm probably going to get kicked out

>> of NVIDIA for this," but it's a great way to look at doing things. And they've done such an amazing job there. When we look at what they're touching and how they're touching, it's all over the place. I was really happy today to hear back-in-America scenario, what Jensen talked about with manufacturing and his commitments. It was amazing, he ended the speech on make America great again. And I was like, he didn't do the hat, but he did the statement, which was kind of interesting. But I think they're going to just continue to grow and leapfrog. One of the things that they're having challenges with were finding more and more talent because they've taken a lot of the talent pool that's out there. Now, they just need to share some of it with the rest of us.

>> And what about

>> for you guys at Northrop? NVIDIA, obviously a core integrator here.

>> Yeah, I think there's a few things for us.

>> We use NVIDIA chips in some of our products, which can be really powerful and bring that AI capability or agentic capability out to areas that are unmanned. Think spacecraft or satellites, and the partnership there is really critical in terms of making sure that we can achieve mission in those kinds of environments. I also think that NVIDIA, obviously, is a huge crowbar to get a lot of people motivated to try and get things done. And so, the partnership there matters, but keying on what Bob was bringing up I think is really important. The difference for us in terms of a partner versus supplier does a vendor look at what's valuable to Northrop as the definition of value or what's valuable to themselves. And I experience with NVIDIA, they're using our definition of value and that really makes it powerful for us. And so, that relationship, it reinforced our ability to achieve mission, to achieve our technical goals and to achieve obviously our time-scale goals. So, I think it's been very important.

>> Yeah, that is very important and I love hearing that too. It's a great way of framing vendor versus partner. I like that a lot, actually.

>> It was great, except for the guy that walked

>> by and cut off the view.

>> That's all right. He was just so excited about all

>> of on the show floor here.

>> He was. He had to get close. - It's okay. We're here for-

>> .

>> Things can happen

>> when you're live on the show floor, folks.

>> Just got to buckle up. You just got to buckle up. Speaking of situational awareness, how can AI improve situational awareness when we're in national security environments?

>> I mean in almost any environment, I would argue that you have a dataset, you have an engine, your large language model in the particular case of generative AI, and then you have your training, your prioritization. And many of our products, and certainly our internal tools and capabilities, and even the way we interface with our internal and external customers, it all starts with can we listen? Do we understand what that information is? How do we process that information? And what priority do we put? So, I just feel like it lines up in such a flexible way to things that we all try and do as people, it just does them a little faster and so that's been great.

>> Yeah, AI's like your super speedy little friend?

>> It is. Yeah. Just a little bit of framework and guardrails

>> and you can be off to the races.

>> Bingo. Bingo. - You just got to make sure you

>> got that set up.

>> Yeah. - Yeah, absolutely. No, it is very exciting to see.

>> And in terms of how you are thinking about your approach to AI and this platform. Inference generative, what are you focused on or are you splitting your focus?

>> Primarily generative. When we think about it, you've got two sides of platform opportunity. One is to do with me and one is to do for me on the agentic side. And so, we're heavily developing use cases on the build with me, help me understand, process this information, help me produce this file, so heavily on the generative side, we have other capabilities on the inference, but we're moving from that build with me to do for me, and we're trying to be very thoughtful and governed in how we approach that. Although we do use agentic quite a bit in our products. Again, you think about unmanned spacecraft as an example, executing mission, or taking in information and responding to it. It needs to act on our behalf. And so, that do-for- me capability is really important there too. But back to your original question, way more on the generative side today for that.

>> Yeah, it's interesting to see the evolution.

>> I love that you just had a little bit of a moment thinking about the spacecraft. Do you ever just really geek out at work?

>> I'm amazed at the things we do.

>> I feel like you'd have to. - It's incredible.

>> No, and space is so cool- - It's pretty neat.

>> Yeah. - ... and you get to work with all that stuff.

>> I saw your eyes light up there

>> and I didn't want to let that moment pass.

>> Bob, you have a extensive history of helping companies innovate, and especially at the federal level. It's complex. There's a lot of rules. There's a lot of opinions. How does this project build on that legacy? And do you feel like it's getting easier, harder, or is it the same as it's been for you in this space historically?

>> To me, this project was very different than what we usually do because... And again, we keep going back to the thing of speed because a lot of time it's business prevention by over- engineering, over-thinking, over-designing, over-redesigning. And now, in this particular case, it was almost, dare I say, commercial, at the speed that we did. And Travis brought up a great point, entrepreneurial thought, right? Because the value of the entrepreneurial thought lets you move quicker, make decisions. Now, look, we're going to make errors and then we're going to figure out how to fix those, but then we move forward. And we always say, if you can get somewhere 80% directionally accurate, the 20%, we can figure that out as we go. So, to me, this was a breath of fresh air that I think the FSIs, systems integrators, need to take a page out of this book and say, "We need to be able to move like this. " Because you have these smaller FSIs that are coming up with these incredible crazy technologies that the government's looking at and saying, "Oh, we want to give that a try and give that a try. " Where if you look at companies like Northrop Grumman, they've always had that capability and that thought leadership. Now, it's a matter of how do they bring it in quicker, so that they can be the ones taking advantage of that versus someone else coming up into the field?

>> Yeah, yeah, yeah. - I think to me, the key thing is

>> to be very clear with your empowerment and what you're trying to achieve, but flexible in the implementation that the team can bring to bear. And that really just takes the reins off of the team to challenge to maybe fail a little bit and work their way through. But they were highly motivated to drive, and obviously, the right partnerships to enable and support with the right knowledge and capability. It was really about getting to a place, not necessarily the path we took.

>> Yeah. - Yeah.

>> Fail fast, it's always the way I look at it.

>> We used to fail slow. In this today and age, it's fail fast.

>> It's real expensive to fail slow right now.

>> Exactly. - Real expensive to fail slow.

>> I have two final questions for you fabulous gentlemen.

>> What do you hope AI does for your friends and family? Bob, I'll start with you. Taking off your Future Tech hat for moment here.

>> Yeah, that's a tough one, right?

>> So, on the personal side, I think there's a great value for ai, but I also think it detracts a little bit from this, the human connection and such. Where you have these models that have been deployed with Grok and other ones, where there's these agents that you're talking to and people are talking to them instead of people. And I think that's a good thing and a bad thing. On the other side, I love what Tesla's done and I love not driving anymore. I can focus on other things. So, I think there's a balance between the personal side of AI and then the mission side of AI. And look, I use Alexa, I use all those tools, but it's funny, when you had this outage that happened with AWS, Ring went down, this went down, and the things that you would normally say or do, I'm like, "Shut the downstairs alarm system. " "Sorry, I'm not around. I can't do that. " And now, it's like, "Ooh, how do I deal with this? " So, you have to sometimes retrain. So, it's positives and negatives.

>> Totally. Absolutely. What about you, Travis?

>> I think back to earlier on when the internet was just first coming and suddenly we had access to information, very free access to information. I'm an old guy, I go back, I used to have to go to the library to get that information. And so, now it's at your fingertips-

>> I still had to go to the library, so yeah.

>> There you go. But now, my kids can go in

>> and get access to organization or thoughtful response or logic in ways that we just to be able to get access to data. And so, I love that for them and I think that can be an accelerant. I want them to still remember that they need to have a plan themselves. They need to have connections themselves. There are things about being human that are important, and this is an accelerating toolkit, which I love and I want them to take advantage of it, but it doesn't replace who we are. So, that would be my hope for them.

>> Yeah, good point. Great point.

>> Yeah, I love that. I love that. Hopefully-

>> What about you?

>> You're going to ask me a question?

>> Yeah. - That's very sweet. I think that

>> we are in a really unique time where

>> I actually am very pro-regulation because I don't want what happened with social media to happen with AI, so I want us to regulate the certain aspects of it that affect who we are, mental health, things like that. I was talking with Dell, I was talking to some of the folks at Memorial Sloan Kettering, and they've reduced the time to get your cancer PhD from four years to three. So, that means we have all of those brains out there curing cancer way faster. They've also been able to do clinical trials in 45 days versus 15 months. The acceleration to finding, to your point, the whole conversation with this being speed, I'm very excited for us to solve our complex problems faster, and hopefully, make the world better for everybody. I don't want any of this to mean that we're on our screens any longer than we already are, though. That's my one major... I don't want it. I don't want it. But yeah, I hope we live healthier, happier lives as a result of the research and discovery we're allowed to make through this, whether it's through space travel, or medicine, or education. It's going to be cool. All right. final question for you guys. Since the velocity of the world is insanely fast, I would normally say this time at GTC DC, but I'm going to say this time or what do you want to be able to say in March when we're at GTC in San Jose that you can't currently say today? You've obviously clearly been able to do things in 90 days very quickly. So, Travis, I'll start with you.

>> I would like to say that we've got a fully realized business case by that time. And the way we find that business case is through use cases that we implement that drive real value to the business. And that's the whole reason we're doing this together as partners and I firmly believe that there are multipliers that we can just introduce to the company. And so, realizing some of that would be my goal by March.

>> I love that. We'll have to have that story on the show.

>> Absolutely, we will. - What about you about, Bob.

>> I mean, I think that's a great way to end it, right?

>> Is to be able to realize the work

>> and the results, the things that we've done together, where their in production, use cases are there and they're just coming to it and taking advantage of it. I mean, that's the follow on. That's the success. That's what we all drive for, mission outcome and how do we get there? So, excited to see what that looks like in March.

>> Well, you always bring great stories, Bob,

>> and we look forward to seeing what's on the docket next. Now, I'm holding you to it, Travis, so get ready.

>> I look forward to it.

>> Travis, Bob, thank you both so much. This has been fantastic.

>> Of course. Thank you for having us.

>> Thank you so much. - Yes,

>> and thank you for tuning into our exclusive coverage here at

>> NVIDIA GTC in our nation's capital, Washington DC. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.