Drew Cukor

Drew Cukor was the founding chief of Project Maven , the US Department of Defense effort that first brought machine learning into the heart of military intelligence work. A retired Marine Corps colonel, he took charge of the Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team when it was created under an April 2017 memo from the Deputy Secretary of Defense, with a narrow but pointed first mission: use computer vision to sift the flood of full-motion video coming off drones over Iraq and Syria, so analysts could spend their time on judgement rather than on watching footage.

Cukor became the program’s public voice as much as its manager. He talked about people and computers working “symbiotically” to detect objects, and he pressed a blunter message to the defence establishment: AI was arriving on the battlefield whether the Pentagon moved quickly or not, and the institution had a choice between leading the change or being overtaken by it. Much of the early work was about plumbing — building the data pipelines, labelling imagery, and forging working relationships with commercial AI companies that had never sold to the military. That commercial partnership is also what made Maven controversial; Google’s involvement triggered an internal staff revolt and the company’s eventual withdrawal.

He kept the team focused on human-in-the-loop decision support rather than autonomous targeting, a distinction that has framed how the US military describes battlefield AI ever since. The system he helped seed grew into the Maven Smart System now used across multiple combatant commands.

Cukor left the Department of Defense in 2021 and moved to the private sector, joining JPMorgan Chase to work on enterprise AI adoption before going on to lead an AI strategy and transformation advisory practice. He has since written publicly about the lessons of the Pentagon’s AI push and how they apply to corporate America’s own attempts to put the technology to work.