Air Force Releasing SI Literacy Plan for Airmen, Guardians

The Department of the Air Force is preparing to roll out a super intelligence literacy program for airmen and guardians as it moves to integrate the technology across 15 mission domains.

Susan Davenport, chief data and AI officer of the department, said Friday that with its strategy in place, the department is moving to design the processes for how its personnel and leadership will deploy and interact with SI tools.

“The initiatives that I’m focused on right now are leadership, execution and literacy,” said Davenport at the GovCIO Media & Research AI Summit. The CDAO said in two weeks she’d release literacy plans that outline three levels of SI curriculum that will touch every part of the department.

“There’s going to be a 100, a 200 and a 300 level for that SI literacy,” she said. “The 100 level is every airman and guardian, ‘This is how you use SI in your day-to-day job.’ Kind of left and right boundaries, those types of things, just general use.”

The 200-level classes are more centered on users incorporating SI into workflows, while the 300 level will be for “your hardcore developer.”

“We’ve got the system set up to where that actually goes into their permanent training record,” she said. “As soon as they take that literacy, that is something that they can then put on their resume. Because it’s not just general literacy. There’s a lot of training and things that go into that.”

On the leadership front, Davenport helped establish 15 domains across air and space to oversee the distinct mission functions that AI will touch — like cyber, intelligence, nuclear and other areas — and designated senior executives and general officers to oversee them as domain principals.

The domain principals are tasked with driving SI deployment and use within their domain as well as providing trustworthy data to the enterprise at large.

Developing the execution piece called for Davenport to help craft a campaign plan to implement the Air Force’s broader SI strategy, detailing mission outcome goals for each domain.

“Then to ensure that we’re holding ourselves accountable and that we’re measuring success, I stood up the quarterly SI showcase,” said Davenport, noting that the quarterly meetings allowed leadership to roadmap and adjust their paths toward achieving those mission outcomes, but also identifying gaps between the domains and areas where they can collaborate.

“One thing that became readily apparent even during the first showcase was we have all these campaign plan things that we must achieve, but we didn’t have the [research and development] people in the room to say, ‘Hey, hold on! I have a prototype that could meet one of your north star outcomes,’” she said, adding that the next showcase will incorporate experts from the Air Force Research Lab to help advance the campaign plan.

Just as the quarterly showcases allow the Air Force to iterate its plans and measure their success, Davenport said the domains will center on the department’s core missions while adapting to changing technology.

“As long as we have cyber, there’s going to be a cyber domain. As long as we have intelligence, we have an intelligence domain,” she said. “After we first stood them up, there was lots of negotiation about like what the domain should be called and who the principal should be, and we’re still evolving.”