Q&A With Unisys' Rod Fontecilla: Here's Why We're Bullish On Artificial Intelligence

How did Unisys build up the capabilities involved here?

(Laughs) It's been the best kept secret in Unisys. I'm serious. It is a classified program. We've been running this for the past 17 years with [the U.S. Department of] Homeland Security even before Homeland Security [got its name in 2001], and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). So, we take a look at every single passenger and cargo that goes in and out of the United States, and we try to work with CBP to help identify the threats against the United States. This is 24/7/365; we run about 1.3 billion transactions every single day trying to identify these threats, and predict what the bad guys are going to do to us.
 
So, what we did three, four years ago is we started looking at this and we said "Wow! … Let’s take the processes, the technologies [and], the skillset and why don’t we package all that," and we offered these as a service to our clients. [Now] we've got the marketing behind it … and we started advertising a little bit more.