Artificial intelligence tools have been a “game changer” for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), with Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard saying today that AI is helping the intelligence community (IC) to get after its core mission.
Speaking at the AWS Summit in Washington, D.C., on June 10, Gabbard explained that AI is helping her office to deliver quality intelligence that’s relevant, timely, and objective to those who need it.
“There’s been an intelligence community chatbot that’s been deployed across the enterprise,” Gabbard said. “Opening up and making it possible for us to use AI applications in the top secret clouds has been a game changer. Once again, looking across all of the IC elements, these are tools that are better helping us get after our mission.”
Gabbard said her team is looking into tools that are the most effective for the IC, noting that it can “save a lot of money” if ODNI is purchasing AI tools that can be used across all 18 intelligence community elements.
Additionally, Gabbard said her newly established Director’s Initiatives Group (DIG) – which she said is focused on where the IC wants to be in the future – is leveraging AI to rebuild trust and transparency in the IC.
“A couple of examples of the application of AI and machine learning that we’ve already used in this Director’s Initiative Group has been around declassification,” Gabbard said. “We have released thousands, tens of thousands of documents related to the assassinations of JFK and Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and we have been able to do that through the use of AI tools far more quickly than what was done previously.”
Another example she shared is that the DIG is using AI tools to help it sort through the Open Source Enterprise faster than analysts could previously.
“Ten thousand hours of media content, for example, that normally would take eight people 48 hours to comb through, now takes one person one hour through the use of some of the AI tools that we have here,” Gabbard said. “So, those are a few of many examples that this Director’s Initiative Group is focused on. Again, not only for ODNI, but really for us to be able to provide these efficiencies and these tools across the entire enterprise.”
Gabbard stressed that in deploying AI, the goal is to operationalize intelligence “so that we don’t collect intelligence just to have it, but to make sure it is applicable and usable and operational for all of our customers.”
Dave Levy, vice president of worldwide public sector at Amazon Web Services (AWS), joined Gabbard on stage to announce that AWS is extending its support for the U.S. government’s classified missions with the new AWS Secret-West Region.
“I’m pleased to announce that Amazon intends to launch this second secret region by the end of the year,” Levy said. “These regions are accredited to support workloads up to the Secret classification level.”
In a separate announcement released on Tuesday, AWS said that defense and national security customers and partners will be able to deploy multi-Region architectures, “achieving even higher levels of resiliency and availability essential to their critical missions and enabling AI innovation.”
“Customers using the new AWS Secret-West Region will be able to use advanced technologies from the world’s leading cloud provider and see their critical missions enhanced by the operational speed, scalability, security, and innovation that AWS provides,” Levy said.