Brendan McCord

Brendan McCord is President of and EVP of Tulco, a holding company that seeks to transform static industries using artificial intelligence (AI). Previously, Brendan was founding Chief Architect of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) Joint AI Center and was primary author of the first DoD AI Strategy. As Head of Machine Learning at the Defense Innovation Unit, Brendan led the creation of the largest open dataset for detecting objects from overhead imagery and oversaw the release of open source software that set the world speed record for training deep neural nets on public cloud infrastructure. Before DoD, Brendan led a team of deep learning researchers and engineers at a startup backed by Bill Gates, In-Q-Tel, and premier VCs. He served in the U.S. Navy as a submarine officer, spending 600+ days underwater. Brendan is Adjunct Senior Fellow at Center for New American Security, tech advisor to the National Security Commission on AI and Commanding General of U.S. Special Operations Command, and Term Member of Council on Foreign Relations. He holds an SB from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an MBA from Harvard Business School.