The challenge with artificial intelligence (AI) is not a lack of capabilities but providing valuable AI-enabled easy-to-use capabilities to the warfighter, according to an official at the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA).
At today’s AFCEA NOVA’s DoD Enterprise IT Day, Deepak Seth, the AI technical lead for DISA’s Emerging Technologies Directorate, explained that the current AI landscape offers DISA a plethora of capabilities to choose from, but “the question is, how can we take advantage of them, and how do we push them towards operational use?”
For example, large language models (LLMs) offer users a model pre-trained to a large dataset and can be fine-tuned for a specific task. However, according to Seth, these models “tend to lack enterprise knowledge.”
“So, we’re looking at how [we] can augment these pre-trained models with enterprises datasets, so when asked the question [the response] is grounded in data that is within the organization,” Seth said.
One of the capabilities that DISA is working on is offering agency officials and warfighters a question-and-answer model.
“The idea is [to] take all this information that we have and then build it in some type of application,” Seth said.
This capability is similar to DISA’s digital concierge, which is slated for full deployment in August.
Concierge AI aims to integrate data with AI and minimize friction for users to find and analyze data. The digital concierge will take data from controlled unclassified information settings and drop them into a database where – via LLMs – that database presents users with answers.
In addition to generative AI and LLMs, DISA seeks to apply AI models, tools, and services to improve its Defensive Cyber Operations (DCO).
According to Seth, the challenge DCO analysts face is not just an increase in attacks, but the attacks have been more rapid and sophisticated. The agency wants to leverage AI tools to analyze incoming data and “detect any anomalies” much quicker.
DISA released a request for information (RFI) published on SAM.gov on March 25, which outlined its interest in exploring the potential applications of commercial AI/ML models, tools, services, and best practices to augment and enhance its current DCO capabilities and methods.
The agency received hundreds of responses and is currently reviewing them.
