In the latest installment of NightDragon’s NightVision series, Founder and CEO Dave DeWalt sat down with Amy Gilliland, President of General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT) — a company leading the way on bringing innovation to government customers.
Few companies occupy the position GDIT does: sitting at the intersection of the world’s most demanding government missions and the fastest-moving wave of commercial technology in a generation. With more than 26,000 employees serving national security, homeland security, and civilian agency programs, GDIT is leading the way on bridging the gap between cutting-edge innovation and government deployment — navigating the complexity of classified environments, long-standing customer relationships, and mission-critical requirements that most commercial technology companies simply cannot.
Amy Gilliland leads that effort, and she brings to the role firsthand mission credibility and a forward-leaning technology vision. As she outlines in the NightVision event, her path began at the United States Naval Academy, continued through nearly a decade of active service in the Navy and has spanned more than 20 years at General Dynamics.
This episode also comes on the heels of NightDragon’s recently announced strategic partnership with GDIT, a collaboration designed to accelerate the insertion of proven commercial innovations into complex government environments across national security, civilian, and health missions.
Here are some key highlights from their conversation. Tune into the full NightVision discussion recording below to hear the entire exchange.
- We Are Living Through a Perfect Storm of Technology Opportunity – Dave opened by describing the current era as unlike anything he has seen across decades as an operator and CEO — a simultaneous convergence of AI, autonomy, quantum computing, space capabilities, and robotics that is fundamentally reshaping the threat and opportunity landscape. Amy Gilliland agreed, noting that GDIT has a front-row seat to what may be the greatest period of technology transformation in a generation. Both emphasized that adversaries are racing to capitalize on these same advances, making the speed at which the U.S. government adopts and deploys innovation a direct national security variable.
- The Government Has Never Been More Ready to Move — And GDIT Built Its Strategy Around This Moment. Amy described a meaningful shift in the current administration’s posture: not just a willingness but a genuine demand to bring emerging technologies to bear on hard mission problems. Those efforts are combined with a deliberate effort to reduce friction in contracting and other processes that have historically slowed adoption for cutting-edge innovators. GDIT’s Vision, Innovation and Acceleration (VIA) strategy was built precisely for this window, Amy said, moving the company from a traditional “tell me what you need and I’ll build it” model toward proactively identifying proven emerging solutions and delivering them into customer environments at speed, with a particular focus on AI, software development, and cybersecurity.
- Trust and Mission Depth Are the Differentiators That Can’t Be Replicated Overnight. Amy was direct about what GDIT brings to any technology partnership that most commercial companies simply cannot: decades of earned trust with the customer, deep knowledge of classified environments, and employees who have worked alongside the mission. That institutional knowledge is what allows GDIT to serve as the critical bridge between a cutting-edge commercial technology and a government program that needs it deployed securely, quickly, and in a way that builds on existing infrastructure investments rather than requiring customers to start over.
- Horizon3.ai Is the Blueprint for What the NightDragon–GDIT Partnership Can Accomplish. Dave and Amy pointed to Horizon3.ai — a NightDragon portfolio company that uses AI to autonomously find vulnerabilities and generate exploits at machine speed — as a concrete proof point for what this collaboration looks like in practice. By combining NightDragon’s investment and strategic support with GDIT’s customer relationships and mission expertise, the partnership accelerated Horizon3.ai’s path to the warfighter, delivering next-generation autonomous cybersecurity capabilities into real programs in a fraction of the time it would have taken through traditional channels.
- Critical Infrastructure Is the Defining Battleground of This Era. Dave raised the urgency of threats to America’s operational technology (OT) networks, pointing to Chinese and Russian campaigns systematically targeting energy, water, and communications infrastructure. Dave and Amy discussed how the NightDragon–GDIT partnership, working alongside portfolio companies like Claroty, is bringing that protection to mission-critical infrastructure at the speed the adversary demands, rather than the pace traditional procurement cycles would allow.
- Scrappy Innovation at Scale Is the Only Way to Win. Amy used the word “scrappy” deliberately to describe the culture she wants both at GDIT and in the companies it partners with — a fire and urgency that refuses to accept the idea that government technology has to be slow, bureaucratic, or behind the commercial cutting edge. Dave echoed that spirit, noting it is exactly what NightDragon looks for when investing in emerging companies, and that the combination of entrepreneurial intensity with GDIT’s scale, mission relationships, and operational credibility is what turns a great technology into a deployed capability that actually protects the nation.
Watch the full NightVision conversation with Amy Gilliland below. View our full list of upcoming events here.