By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. on January 14, 2021 at 4:30 PM An Air Force maintenance sergeant at work on an HH-60 helicopter. WASHINGTON: “When you talk about defense spending, there are very few places that you can spend money and actually get a positive fiscal return on your investment,” notes Lt. Gen. Mike Groen, director of the Pentagon’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center. “AI has places where you can actually spend money to make money.” Lt. Gen. Michael Groen But before any given organization in the Defense Department can reap the benefits of AI, Groen told me in an exclusive interview, it has to do two things: