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8 HARTFORDBUSINESS.COM | APRIL 6, 2026 Greg Forrest (far left), Lockheed Martin vice president of AI foundations and commercialization, and Mike Harasimowicz (far right), executive assistant to the chief data and AI officer and managing director of AI innovations, discuss the company's AI strategy. Contributed Photo Megan Williams, Lockheed Martin AI engagement and community operations engineer, and Greg Forrest, vice president of AI foundations and commercialization, inspect hardware in the company's AI development lab in Shelton. Contributed Photo Digital Arsenal Shelton hub helps defense giant Lockheed Martin deploy AI across its global operations defense giant's focus has since shifted from building those tools to expanding their use across the company. 'Own how we build it' Ensuring the technology is used across different programs is the job of Grace Scanlon, a former Sikorsky engineer who has worked at the AI Center since its inception. "We're opening the door to new tech- nologies in a central way that makes it feasible and cost-effective for a lot of programs where it otherwise wouldn't be," said Scanlon, who is an AI systems engineering manager. That centralized approach is critical given the high cost of computing power needed to run AI models. By housing that infrastructure in one place, Lockheed Martin — which employs more than 120,000 people worldwide and reported about $71 billion in revenue in 2025 — allows engineers across the company to access those capabilities without duplicating expensive systems within individual teams or programs. Those shared systems are used in several ways across the organization. At the broadest level, the compa- ny's Navigator tool — a generative AI chatbot — is used by more than 80,000 employees. The system includes about 20,000 AI agents performing tasks on Lockheed's hardware and software infrastructure. Another program, Genesis, allows users to access large language models hosted on a central cluster, allowing teams to customize AI agents for specific tasks or areas of expertise. At the most specialized level, By Harriet Jones hjones@hartfordbusiness.com L ockheed Martin — the Mary- land-based defense contractor that produces fighter jets, missile systems, satellites and military helicopters — said in early March it was in the process of quadrupling production of "critical munitions," as global demand rises, including needs tied to the U.S. war with Iran. That ramp-up is being supported by artificial intelligence tools developed over several years at the company's Shelton-based center, where Lock- heed has built a centralized system to deploy AI across its global opera- tions. The platform allows teams to share data, automate manufacturing processes and identify supply chain constraints, helping speed production. According to an industry analyst, that coordinated approach has made Lockheed Martin a leader in AI adop- tion in the defense sector. The Lockheed AI Center, or LAIC, traces its origins to an engineering team formed about a decade ago at Sikorsky Aircraft in Stratford. "We were working on what we call prognostics and health management," said Greg Forrest, now the vice pres- ident of AI foundations and commer- cialization for Lockheed. "Essentially using data to predict when compo- nents on a helicopter may fail." The team was in the right place at the right time. When Lockheed acquired Sikorsky in 2015, their expertise in AI — combined with the increasing availability of big data sets and advances in computing power — made the technology useful across more parts of the company. Forrest and his team proposed what became the AI Center in 2021. It now encompasses about 350 engineers distributed across the company, including 25 in Connecticut. "We wanted to drive a hub-and- spoke model across the business," Forrest said. "We provide underlying foundational technologies — the tools that teams use to build AI — and then we proliferate that across all of our business areas." Together, those tools form what Lockheed calls its "AI Factory." The