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What high-performing agencies do differently with data. Jennifer Chronis, the vice president of US public sector sales at Snowflake, said trusting your data is key in the battle against fraud, waste and abuse. October 13, 2026 10:06 am As agencies deal with a shrinking workforce and limited budgets, the focus on driving more efficiency is more important than ever. To achieve that efficiency, it's clear agencies need trusted data, solid governance and integrated systems. All of these depend on a cloud infrastructure that can support data sharing and address the challenges of working across new and legacy IT systems. On top of the efficiency drive, agencies are under intense pressure to further strengthen efforts to combat fraud, waste and abuse. The use of artificial intelligence and open data standards are key to improving the drive for efficiencies. Jennifer Chronis, the vice president of US public sector sales at Snowflake, said to achieve most, if not all, of these goals, agencies must be able to see across all of their datasets, especially when it comes to managing and mitigating risks to programs. "It's also important for them to be able to move from just reactive detection of fraud, waste and abuse to proactive detection of fraud, waste and abuse, and we're doing that with several customers," Chronis said on the discussion Innovation in Government sponsored by Carahsoft. "We're doing some work with a large federal health and human services organization. They process more than a trillion payments annually, and for them, it's been historically difficult to discover fraud, waste and abuse in all of those payments simply because of the siloed data systems that they're dealing with. Snowflake has partnered with GDIT for several years now to help this organization discover fraud, waste and abuse by modernizing their data platform. We worked with them to modernize over 16 petabytes of data. We've been able to cut data query times for them by more than 50 percent, so it's really, really exciting work." Trusted data leads to better analytics. One big difference about the work Snowflake does for this large federal health and human services organization, or any other customer, is the advancements in the technology that make the integration and manipulation of data much more straight forward and secure. Chronis said assigning roles and responsibilities to employees is an important part of creating trust in the information that can lead to confidence in the results of the analysis. "Customers have to be able to share data without moving it, without copying it and, in some cases, without even having to transform it. So that just makes the ability for a customer to have confidence in their data, much, much stronger because of the simplicity with which we can allow those customers to share it," she said. The ability to share and have confidence in the data becomes even more important in battle against fraud, waste and abuse. The Trump administration has made the detecting and stopping of fraud a top priority for every agency. Chronis said what is different about the White House's initiative is the power of artificial intelligence used with trusted data to discover patterns and obtain insights more quickly than ever. "There used to be a lot of long involved processes to move data into systems in order to be able to detect the anomalies and prevent the fraud. Once you have a solid data foundation, you can implement all of the various AI capabilities that have been changing so rapidly over the last even six months," she said. "We can use that data in, what we like to say, that semantic layer of the data. That is super important because applying AI models just sort of randomly on open internet data is not going to get you a lot of insights. You need to be able to do it in a system that houses your data and can provide the context and the semantics associated with that data." Open standards, open architectures. To continue to make progress and ensure data availability, agencies need to move to open standards and open architectures. Chronis said agencies would see several benefits from using these approaches. "It helps agencies connect data across existing systems without having to rip and replace. Open architectures help customers make use of that data, regardless of what system, what program, what customer organization owns that data, in order to be able to build upon that data and use it," she said. "The second is really just reducing vendor lock-in. It's important for government agencies, in particular, to own their data, to not have to rent their data from any vendor. Open standards and open architectures really give governments the flexibility to adopt new technology like AI and analytics, as their requirements evolve, without having to incur as much expense as they would have if they had been using proprietary standards and architecture." While the administration has emphasized the battle against fraud, waste and abuse, Chronis said data and AI tools also can drive success in other mission and back-office functions. Chronis said natural language AI agents are valuable for developing applications to address specific mission areas without the employee having any expertise in programming. "Natural language AI agents allow customers to just ask questions of data and develop applications using plain old English," she said. "We've been able to develop demos for customers with large volumes of data that would have taken custom developers and large involved contracts months to pull demos together. We've been able to do those things in hours. One, in particular, for a customer recently, we did in about five hours with the basic demo capability with lots of human resources data. We used synthetic data, and it was something that would have taken them months previously. So we're really seeing customers want to try to do those things as quickly as possible, and helping them and enabling them along that journey is really important to us." Jason Miller is executive editor of Federal News Network and directs news coverage on the people, policy and programs of the federal government. Related Topics

General Dynamics names next CEO, as Novakovic becomes exec chairman. Danny Deep is president of defense and aerospace giant * General Dynamics' CEO since 2013, Phebe Novakovic to transition to executive chairman in 2027 * President Danny Deep to be Reston-based defense contractor's next CEO * Novakovic has been named one of Fortune's 100 Most Powerful Women in business Longtime General Dynamics CEO Phebe Novakovic will transition to executive chairman on Jan. 1, 2027, as President Danny Deep becomes the Fortune 500 aerospace and defense contractor's next CEO, the Reston-based company announced Wednesday. Deep has been with General Dynamics for 25 years and became president in 2025, after serving as executive vice president of its global operations and combat systems divisions, and president of land systems. Novakovic, who has been CEO since 2013 and also holds the title of chairman, regularly ranks among Fortune's list of the world's 100 Most Powerful Women in business, coming in this year at No. 30. Ranked No. 318 on the Fortune Global 500 list in 2025 and No. 91 on Fortune's 2026 500 list, General Dynamics employs more than 100,000 people worldwide and reported $52.6 billion in fiscal 2025 revenue, up from $47.7 billion in 2024. "Danny is a highly skilled executive with rich operating experience. It has been a pleasure working closely with him and I am certain he will be an outstanding CEO," Novakovic said in a statement. "I very much look forward to our continuing collaboration." In December 2025, Deep was promoted to president of General Dynamics, after having served most recently as its executive vice president of global operations, a promotion he received in June 2025. Deep was appointed executive vice president of combat systems in April 2024. Deep called Novakovic, a former CIA officer who also served as special assistant to the secretary of defense, "an extraordinary leader for General Dynamics" in a statement Wednesday and added, "I am grateful for the close partnership we've shared and the opportunity to continue working together in the future." Under Novakovic's leadership, in 2019 General Dynamics won the Navy's largest-ever shipbuilding contract, worth up to $24.2 billion, to build nuclear-powered submarines, with Newport News Shipbuilding as a subcontractor. In 2020, she was named Virginia Business Person of the Year, chiefly because she led her company to financial success amid the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, when most businesses were posting significant losses. General Dynamics' successes continued, including with this year's federal contract wins. In March, General Dynamics' Electric Boat subsidiary won a $15.3 billion contract modification to continue building Columbia-class submarines. And in July, Electric Boat won $29.5 billion to build five more. Fewer women at the top Novakovic was one of Virginia's top-paid CEOs in 2025, as well as the highest-paid woman chief executive on this year's list. She ranked No. 5, with about $25.9 million in total compensation. With her departure, there also will be fewer women among Fortune 1000 companies' CEOs, especially in the defense sector. In Virginia, Northrop Grumman CEO Kathy Warden, who was named the Falls Church Global Fortune 500 contractor's CEO in 2019, and Carey Smith, chair, president and CEO of Centreville-based Parsons since 2022, remain in the upper echelon of the sector. Accenture Chair and CEO Julie Sweet, who works between offices in Arlington County and Bethesda, Maryland, was ranked No. 4 on Fortune's list of the 100 Most Powerful Women in business in May, in addition to Warden and Novakovic. In October 2025, Toni Townes-Whitley stepped down as CEO of Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC) after two years in the post. She has been replaced by Jim Reagan, who was named the Fortune 500 contractor's permanent CEO in February. Last week, Amy Gilliland stepped down as president of General Dynamics Information Technology, the Falls Church subsidiary of General Dynamics, after leading the 26,000-employee unit since 2017. "On behalf of the board, we thank Phebe for her outstanding leadership and lasting contributions to General Dynamics," said Laura J. Schumacher, independent lead director. "Phebe has led with vision, integrity and a deep commitment to our people and our ethos. We have greatly benefitted from her efforts in setting a clear strategic vision, creating enduring value and in building a strong and capable leadership team."