Federal Contractors | Technology 2024: CANDICE LING

Since taking the lead of Microsoft’s federal arm in July 2023, Ling has focused on forging partnerships and advancing artificial intelligence, cloud computing and emerging technologies for federal customers.

This year, Ling announced that Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI generative AI tool would be available to federal customers through the company’s Azure Government Cloud environment.

Microsoft competes for tech and digital modernization task orders under the Department of Defense’s $9 billion Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract with rival contractors Amazon Web Services, Google and Oracle. In the past year and a half or so, DOD has spent about $600 million on the program, but it’s not publicly known how much Microsoft received.

Before her current post, Ling served as Microsoft’s civilian federal sector vice president and as a government industry leader in Asia. She also spent
19 years with Canadian consulting firm CGI, serving as a senior vice president, among other positions.

Ling received a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Western Michigan University and an MBA from the University of Texas at Austin. In March, Ling was selected for the first time for Executive Mosaic’s annual Wash100 list of top government contracting executives.