The Coast Guard’s new Digital Transformation Strategy focuses on improving access to data, tools and services across the service’s workforce.

Brian Campo, director of technology readiness and chief data and AI officer at the Coast Guard, said the strategy, released in May, is different than past modernization efforts.

“We’ve been really trying to go through a number of digital transformation efforts,” Campo said during Federal News Network’s Cloud Exchange 2026.

“A lot of them have been more infrastructure focused or more component focused,” he continued. “This one we really tried to look at it a little bit differently. We started to think a little bit more about: What are the fundamentals of digital transformation? How do we get the workforce involved? How do we give them the tools that they need, rather than thinking of it as just sort of network switches and cloud?”

The strategy puts a premium on automating repetitive administration tasks and reducing manual workloads. It also calls for delivering near-real-time data across operations. The Coast Guard is also focusing on delivering capabilities faster, while “empowering” the workforce with new technologies.

The strategy is a key thrust under the Force Design 2028 initiative aimed at overhauling and modernizing the Coast Guard.

Campo said he’s gotten “amazing” feedback on the strategy so far.

“It’s given us a chance to bring in leadership all the way down to our boat crews, giving them a chance to understand that the Coast Guard is moving in a new direction, and making sure that we’re giving them the tools that they need to be successful,” he said.

Leaning into data-driven decision-making

One of the top priorities under the Coast Guard’s digital modernization efforts is Coastal Sentinel, a next-generation maritime surveillance, command and control, and communications system.

The goal is to fuse data from across sensors and apply artificial intelligence and machine learning to monitor maritime activity.

Campo called it a major overhaul of several monolithic systems.

“We’re trying to think differently about the way that we field these big systems,” he said. “Instead of huge monoliths, thinking about them as distributed services. How can we get after pieces, parts of them individually? What can we do today to improve the life of a coastie as immediately as possible? And then what can we do over the course of time to improve those services iteratively, making sure that we don’t fall behind on technology as we’re moving forward?”

The ultimate goal is to accelerate how the Coast Guard gets from “data to information to decisions,” Campo said.

The service’s Technology Readiness Directorate has also established a “Decision Advantage” organization that is focused on how the Coast Guard can best leverage its data.

That work will feed into how the Coast Guard develops analytics, dashboards and AI models.

“The next phase for us is to be able to build a landing zone for data, so we can share it at speed and scale,” Campo said.

Automating to reduce burden on Guard teams

The Coast Guard is also establishing a “software yard” to develop new capabilities. Campo said that will provide employees with low-code platforms and other tools.

He said the service is looking to automate tasks that can be a burden on the workforce, such as gathering data or managing a process across multiple documents.

The Coast Guard is already starting to automate maintenance tasks, in part by digitizing paper forms and manuals.

“Those are absolute areas where if we can give them the right information, do it in a digital format, where they can take a tablet with them, that tablet can be showing them the maintenance as they’re starting to do it,” Campo said. “They can punch in what they’re doing as they’re doing it. They can get more information if something’s not going the way they need it, or if they’re looking for schematics that they didn’t even think they were going to need. All that information is pre-staged on the device, giving them that optimized performance to get after it.”

He said the Coast Guard has started digitizing paper maintenance cards, with a longer term goal of tying data from the digitized maintenance information into logistics systems.

“Those have been literal cards that they would have to carry around, they’re constantly having to be rewritten. One person comes in after another person, they can’t read the handwriting, and that’s a lot of friction,” Campo said. “That’s where we’re starting, and then the integration into our other systems, those are going to be stage two, and then stage three will be bringing in that contextual information.”

The Coast Guard is inculcating a digital-first mentality through its Technology Readiness Directorate. Campo pointed to the directorate’s Technology Readiness Transformation Office and the Robotics and Autonomous Systems Office as examples of “digital-first” programs.

“What we’re trying to do is think about what does it mean for them to start in the digital age? Not be burdened by some of the legacy things that other acquisition organizations do, not be burdened by policies and regulations that weren’t really built for the 21st century,” Campo said. “Between the two of them, we’ve really created and curated this idea of a digital first workforce, a digital-first mission, and then a mission engineering model to get after that.”

As the directorate develops unmanned systems and other capabilities, Campo said it’s using mission engineering and “digital threads” to better understand how they fit into Coast Guard operations.

“We’re bringing those in as digital models, so we can put them into any one of our mission threads, we can see how they’re going to perform, we can think about what they’re going to be able to do, and then we can work back and forth with the vendor on iterations we want to do,” he said.

The Coast Guard last year also established a Futures Development and Integration directorate to chart the future of the service and spearhead Force Design 2028.

“They’re really the ones that are doing some high-level mission planning,” Campo said. “What does the Coast Guard of the future need to look like? What does operating in the 2050s look like?”

Future considerations include how unmanned vehicles will change the Coast Guard’s mainstay search and rescue mission or how new sensors could expand the service’s picture of what’s happening along coastlines and across maritime environments.

“Those sorts of things are where we’re thinking about these digital models, then turning it into something where we can really be more intentional about the operations of the Coast Guard, but still putting the workforce front and center, making sure that they are the ones that are driving these missions,” Campo said. “Those are really, really exciting things.”

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