AIAA CTO Summit 2026 Drives Insights into Advancing Technology

Challenges fall primarily around organizational barriers, not technology barriers

The CTO Summit 2026 welcomed 59 senior technology leaders for in-depth discussions on how CTOs can drive faster production and achieve technology superiority. Again this year, The MITRE Corporation hosted the event at its headquarters in McLean, Virigina. This exclusive benefit for AIAA Corporate Member organizations delivered a collaborative environment for frank discussions about pressing needs facing today’s CTOs.

Attendees heard from top tier speakers, including several government officials:

• The Honorable Michael Cadenazzi, Assistant Secretary of War for Industrial Base Policy, Department of War
• The Honorable Joseph Jewell, Ph.D., Assistant Secretary of War for Science and Technology, Department of War
• Abigail Grace, Professional Staff Member, Subcommittee on Defense, Senate Committee on Appropriations, U.S. Senate

Visionary industry speakers also spoke, including:

• Carissa Christensen, Founder and CEO, BryceTech
• Timothy Costa, Ph.D., Vice President and General Manager for Industrial and Computational Engineering, NVIDIA
• Jenny Irvine, Vice President of Technology, IQT
• Jon Lusczakoski, Partner, AE Industrial Partners
• Aalok Mehta, Ph.D., Director, Wadhwani AI Center, Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)
• Michael Thacker, Senior Vice President of Engineering, Pratt & Whitney

AIAA Working Groups Leading Work on AI, Autonomy, Digital Thread

The call to action from last year’s CTO Summit resulted in the formation of working groups on AI Applications in Aerospace, Scaling Autonomyand Enabling Digital Thread. Leaders of the Working Groups shared their progress and looked ahead at plans for the coming year. In the coming year, they will focus on the ethical use of AI, the need for shared data, and the prioritization of technical investments. Their common theme was the need for communication, collaboration, and overcoming organizational challenges to achieve technological advancements.

Main Takeaways

Throughout the event, several topics emerged as takeaways:

• The A&D ecosystem doesn’t have an invention problem; it has an execution problem. One phrase that was used was, “The bottleneck has shifted from invention to execution.” Underscoring this, attendees cited accelerating production, fielding, and repair equally as important to their organizations as developing cutting-edge technologies, in terms of enterprise priorities. And developing good enough products and services was cited as equally important as developing exquisite production and services.  Furthermore, there were suggestions to change the use of TRLs as the traditional measure of progress to mission, integration, or production readiness.
• Ecosystems and partnerships are increasingly important for acceleration and differentiation, as private capital deployment has surged and the sources of innovation have consequently shifted and fragmented. Connecting to adjacent industries is under-appreciated.
• The need to design aerospace systems and organizations for continuous change is paramount. Participants advocated separating hardware from “smarts”, modular architectures, design for rate, and integration readiness measures, among other things. Aerospace cannot achieve speed and scale if each technology insertion requires rebuilding or requalifying an entire tightly coupled system.
• AI continues to be a critical focus for CTOs, but is viewed as less of a technology issue, and more challenges for trust, coordination and verification in order to realize AI’s potential in aerospace and defense, with verification and assurance a new bottleneck. Said another way, AI is viewed less of a technology issue and more of a forcing function exposing A&D’s weaknesses in assurance, collaboration, and information sharing.
• Consequently, the view on the most important roles of the CTO is shifting to include responsibilities for transforming the organization and for driving ecosystem orchestration, not just leading the development of breakthrough technologies. A number of attendees indicated the importance of having a formal discussion on this with their CEOs or equivalents, as the mixing of C-suite roles is real, particularly between CTO, COO and CIO – requiring adjustments to operating models and decision rights.

What Happens Next

Attendees expressed the desire for AIAA to play roles that could improve trust, coordination and translation as a neutral party in ways that others cannot. Ideas included support in the process of determining what is possible and how members can work together to create onramps. They wanted additional help understanding the tools and business cases in a trust environment, and case studies of the human aspect of engagement and gaining technical proficiency. AIAA is prioritizing the ideas and requests the group surfaced to identify solutions and timelines for ongoing work.