Pat Host 
- SOSi Chief Growth Officer Jim Edwards is standing up a cell at SOSi focused on securing other transaction awards
- A comprehensive ODNI open-source intelligence strategy behooves industry to deliver improved data provenance tools
- He sat down with ExecutiveBiz for his most recent Spotlight interview to talk OSINT, the new National Security Strategy and the growth of LLMs
Rapidly-advancing technologies such as artificial intelligence force contractors to change or die. This imperative to constantly adapt keeps GovCon exciting for Jim Edwards, SOSi chief growth officer, and prevents it from getting stale.
Edwards viewed GovCon as an obvious career path after his 25 years in the U.S. Army, retiring as a military intelligence colonel. The industry enabled him to stay close to the mission he loved while continuing his contributions to national security.
Edwards is now excited to stand up a cell focused on securing contract awards under other transaction authorities—a growing market across many federal agencies. Edwards sat down with ExecutiveBiz for his latest Spotlight interview to discuss how President Trump’s new National Security Strategy impacts the intelligence community, how a new open-source intelligence strategy will impact GovCons, and challenges and opportunities involved with harnessing data.
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ExecutiveBiz: How do you see the president’s new National Security Strategy impacting the IC in 2026?
Jim Edwards: I think the National Security Strategy will drive a reallocation of intelligence priorities and resources away from traditional ‘great power competition’ toward immigration, border security, drug trafficking, economic supply chains and the Western Hemisphere. I see this refocus occurring across intelligence agencies, the Departments of War and Homeland Security, and within federal law enforcement agencies.
I’m excited by these prospects because SOSi was originally founded to support the law enforcement community and we are proud of our 35-year history working with the Drug Enforcement Agency; Immigration and Customs Enforcement; Customs and Border Protection; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
EBiz: The Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a comprehensive open-source intelligence strategy in 2024. How significant is it and how do you think it will impact GovCons in the coming year?
Edwards: ODNI’s strategy is important because it formalizes the role of OSINT as a core intelligence discipline and outlines modernization priorities. As a result, I think OSINT is becoming increasingly institutionalized in IC workflows and is treated less like an ad-hoc tool.
AI-powered OSINT tools are already having a significant impact by automating data ingestion and correlation across diverse sources of text, imagery and metadata, including social media, government data and the dark web. These tools reduce processing times, enable IC officers to sift through vast amounts of big data quickly and ultimately give practitioners more time to think.
The tools that are emerging can be especially useful in identifying sources of information that can improve our confidence in intelligence assessments. I see an enormous need for industry to deliver new tools in 2026 that improve confidence in the data we acquire, which is often called data provenance. We need specialized machine learning models with improved capabilities to detect patterns of misinformation and “deepfake” content. I’m also excited by these developments, as SOSi’s exoINSIGHT platform is one of the leaders in this rapidly-evolving field.
For more of Edwards’ thoughts on OSINT, check out our interview with him from the 2025 Intel Summit.
EBiz: Data must be collected, analyzed and understood to be used effectively. What are some of the key challenges and opportunities you’re seeing emerge as organizations harness data and use it to drive decisions?
Edwards: Government and industry organizations are both trying to cope with the explosion of big data through AI-enabled solutions. This is both a challenge and an opportunity. We are seeing organizations use automated tools to obtain, process, correlate and visualize vast amounts of data. Then, algorithms drive predictive analytics.
In its simplest form, we see the proliferation of large language models to summarize thousands of documents or business intelligence dashboards. These enable executives to see broad trends and variances from expected performance, and they provide the capability to drill down into specific data anomalies that enable management decisions.
Most early adopters are gaining competitive advantages that will not easily be overcome. This is because these organizations’ workforces are gaining increased efficiency and effectiveness to accomplish a given task. We are already seeing this play out in GovCon and the IC.
Those that fail to adapt will become irrelevant in the years ahead. This is one aspect of today’s marketplace that excites me. The imperative to change prevents my job from ever getting stale.
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Who Is Jim Edwards?
Edwards is the chief growth officer at SOSi. He previously held senior positions at Perspecta (now Peraton), and DynCorp (now Amentum). Edwards spent 25 years as an Army intelligence officer, including wartime deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. As a colonel, he served as the chief operations officer (G3) of the Army’s Airborne Corps, led the Army’s largest command as the senior intelligence officer (G2) and commanded the service’s first battlefield surveillance brigade in combat.
What Does Jim Edwards Do at SOSi?
Edwards is responsible for developing customer relationships and new partnerships within the intelligence, defense and federal civilian markets.
