Disrupt Yourself Before Someone Else Does
From an early-career layoff that became a 13-person startup to building the synthetic Earth where Lockheed Martin's AI systems train before they ever deploy, Adam’s career has tracked one stubborn question: what's next?
A Humble Start with a Big Responsibility
Adam, chief of innovation for Lockheed Martin's Training, Logistics and Simulation business in Rotary and Mission Systems, spends his days asking how to do things faster, more affordably and before someone else does. He's been refining that question for nearly two decades inside the company.
A Startup in the Truest Sense
Adam’s first job while in college didn't last. The satellite imagery company he was working for in Orlando, Florida, laid off its entire 13-person staff. Rather than scatter, the team founded Data Transfer Solutions, a small business consulting group that pioneered web-based city asset mapping.
"I cut my teeth in that job. We did everything from setting up the server racks to painting the office," Adam says. "Experiencing that while working on a computer science degree at University of Central Florida, I learned a lot about business operations in my formative years."
The company eventually sold for $45 million. By then, Adam had already moved on to Lockheed Martin, the place where his three passions — software, video games and his family's military legacy — could converge.
He joined Lockheed Martin in 2008 as a software engineer, writing gunnery simulations for the U.S. Army's Stryker in Ada, an aging language he learned on the job. Soon after, the company acquired a version of Microsoft Flight Simulator and began turning it into an innovative training platform. Adam helped take that training platform commercial, building the storefront, the licensing and the digital rights management. He went on to lead the program, growing Prepar3D (pronounced "prepared") into the most successful commercial software in Lockheed Martin's history, with a customer base of more than 100,000.
"It was a small-business attitude inside Lockheed Martin," he says. "Now the whole industry wants to do that. Back then, it was controversial."
The AI Proving Ground
Today, Adam leads R&D efforts across the Training, Logistics and Simulation line of business and helps lead other strategic efforts with the Technology and Strategic Innovation organization’s LAIC (Lockheed Martin AI Center. His current focus is the AI Fight Club™ initiative and its core enabling technology, Cogniverse™, an ‘AI-ready’ synthetic environment built on Lockheed Martin's two decades of modeling-and-simulation work. He says, "Cogniverse is a synthetic environment to test AI agents and systems before deployment into the real world."
Building a Culture That Thrives on Curiosity and Risk
Why it matters: in the past 18 months, Adam says, the conversation around AI has flipped. People used to be skeptical it would work. Now the risk is the opposite. He warns of "cognitive surrender," where humans trust AI judgment over their own without testing whether the AI was ready for the task.
His team puts AI systems through the wringer in a synthetic world that mirrors reality, at a scale real-world testing can't reach. AI typically gets trained in isolation, tested in labs and then deployed without ever encountering the chaos of the real environment. Cogniverse closes that gap, letting an AI agent experience things it's never seen before, in scenarios that would otherwise be impossible to stage.
The math is what brings the point home. The real-world equivalent of one recent AI Fight Club exercise inside Cogniverse would have cost more than $500 trillion, expended 18 million aircraft and taken 114 years. The AI Fight Club team ran it synthetically in a month.
"Live data is the gold standard," Adam says. "But the data we're getting from synthetic environments is at least silver."
What Most People Get Wrong About AI
Ask Adam what he wishes more people understood about AI, and he'll resist the easy answer.
AI isn't going to wholesale replace humans, he says. It's going to replace tasks. And there's no single AI answer for any complex problem. The real value emerges when collections of AI systems work together, with a human in charge.
For the next generation, his advice has shifted with the technology. Five years ago, he says he would have told his five kids, and any college student, to study computer science without hesitation. Today, he says he's less sure of the specific degree and more sure of the mindset.
"You're not going to get replaced by AI. You're going to get replaced by somebody who understands how to use AI for their discipline," he says.
Ready to Disrupt?
At Lockheed Martin, that mindset is the work. From a synthetic Earth that lets AI experience reality before it deploys, to inner-sourced platforms that share what one team builds across the entire enterprise, the company is asking the same question Adam asks himself every day: how do we do this better, faster, and most importantly, before someone else does?
If that sounds like the kind of problem you'd want to solve, explore opportunities to join our team. The next generation of innovators is already on its way. You could be part of what comes next.