DISA wants to use AI as a ‘digital concierge’ for its workforce

JASPREET GILL

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As the Pentagon assesses ways artificial intelligence can be applied to military operations, one defense agency wants the technology to serve as a “digital concierge” for its future operations.

Speaking to reporters at the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) Forecast to Industry, Steve Wallace, chief technology officer and director of DISA’s emerging technology directorate, said large language models, especially, could be a “digital concierge” that could help the workforce “in all aspects of their job.”

“Whether that be the back office work, or whether that be, say, the analyst sitting on the floor and that ability to quickly diagnose and deal with things,” he said.

AI can also specifically help DISA’s defensive cyber operator analysts by automating nearly 80 percent of the data they review, Brian Hermann, program executive officer for cyber, told reporters. “And then their brains can be applied to those really high-end problems,” he said. “And I would argue that that’s really the only way we could react with speed to appear competitive.”

While DoD is seeing adoption of AI across the department, Wallace added that DISA is trying to better understand the ethical use of the technology. His comments come after DoD released an AI strategy just last week to accelerate the department’s adoption of AI capabilities that took into account generative AI tools like large language models.

While announcing the new strategy Nov. 2, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks acknowledged to reporters that relying on commercial capabilities means the technologies available may not yet be compatible with DoD’s own ethical AI principles. DoD’s new AI strategy followed an executive order from the White House that was hailed by the Biden administration as being “one of the most significant actions ever taken by any government to advance the field of AI safety” in order to “ensure that America leads the way” in managing risks posed by the technology.

Michael Johnson, a senior advisor to the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and AI Office announced Monday the organization will be releasing a new publicly accessible toolkit “very soon” that will, in part, aim to show industry what the department’s expectations are when guiding the development of ethical AI.

“It’s a web app you can get to, it’s publicly accessible,” Johnson told reporters at a roundtable hosted by consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton. “It needs to be publicly releasable and usable, so our industry partners know exactly what our expectations are [and] so the public knows exactly how the DoD is thinking.”