(US and Canada) The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has named Dr. Douglas Matty as the Pentagon’s new Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer (CDAO).

Matty brings nearly three decades of experience as a commissioned officer in the U.S. Army, where he held a variety of leadership roles. He succeeds Radha Plumb, who stepped down in mid-January 2025. Since then, Principal Deputy Margie Palmieri has served as the office’s interim head.

Matty is the third official to lead the Pentagon’s AI office. Craig Martell was the first, beginning in April 2022 following the office’s unofficial formation in January of that year. He played a pivotal role in the Army’s AI Task Force, initially serving as deputy director when it was launched under Army Futures Command in 2018 to support the DoD’s Joint AI Center.

Matty was promoted to director in September 2020 and led the task force until December 2022. His Army service also included roles as an operations research systems analyst in the Office of the Deputy Under Secretary of the Army for Business Transformation, and as deputy director for the Capabilities Development Group at U.S. Cyber Command.

Following his military career, Matty transitioned to the private sector and academia, continuing to focus on defense-related data, analytics, and AI. Most recently, he served as director of AI for contested logistics at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

Matty graduated from West Point with a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering and has a PhD in engineering systems from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).