Defense Leaders Harness AI to Accelerate Innovation

Leaders across the Defense Department are creating new innovation pathways to bring in and scale emerging technologies like artificial intelligence to empower the end user, federal tech experts explained during the GovCIO Media & Research Defense IT Summit in Arlington, Virginia, last week.

The rapid advancement of emerging technologies has accelerated the need for government to innovate and adopt solutions quickly, ensuring it stays competitive and ahead of the curve.

Creating Pathways for Innovation

Collen Roller, senior computer scientist at the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), is working to create pipelines to bring new capabilities to end users and stressed the need for better pipelines to support innovation.

“There’s not that many ways to get capabilities built and out there. And it’s really, really important that we create pipelines and ways to do that,” Roller said. “[The lack of pathways to innovate] turned into me creating a software factory, where I could bring innovators together and try to deploy and deliver capabilities to end users.”

Roller, AFRL NIPRGPT creator, built a software factory and dedicated a significant amount of time to determining how to implement the right security measures, obtain full authority to operate for the environment and develop the most cost-effective way to innovate.

“If you give them a path to the end state, which is delivering something to an end user or customer, they will take it. And it’s amazing to see … where we have specifically seen literally hundreds of developers band together to build capabilities for folks. And it’s been truly amazing to witness people coming out of the woodwork to help out with building certain products to benefit the end user,” said Roller.

The reality, he explained, is that many of the web applications needed for data management are not particularly difficult to build, especially with the advancements in AI.

“GenAI gives a non technical expert the ability to build simple applications very, very quickly,” Roller explained. “If you’re not using GenAI in 2025 you’re slow at your job, if you’re a software developer. … We really need to lean in to GenAI adoption, because it’s going to change everything.”

Using Emerging Technology to Empower Workers

Federal leaders are facing new challenges in data management as the amount of digital information only increases. DOD’s Cyber Crime Center (DC3) is exploring innovative ways to leverage emerging data types to advance its mission, while integrating AI to empower its workforce to process information more efficiently.

DC3 Chief Scientist Lam Nguyen explained how data is constantly being exchanged between devices, leaving a trail of virtual breadcrumbs for investigators to follow.

“My smart watch might have talked to your home security system,” said Nguyen. “That is very tangible evidence that we can collect if we know to collect it, and if we know what to do with it once it’s been collected.”

Nguyen and his team are trying to address the challenges posed by data collection. He said AI will play a large role in helping investigators perform their jobs better, emphasizing that the technology will not be a replacement.

“You have a lot of data on your phone, and somebody needs to go read through that if they’re doing an analysis or an investigation on your phone. Wouldn’t it be nice if AI could just summarize those conversations,” said Nguyen. “We’re not looking at it from an autonomous perspective. We’re looking at it from a control perspective that makes our work easier.”

Accelerating Tech Delivery

Program Executive Officer for Digital and Enterprise Services (PEO Digital) at the Department of the Navy Louis Koplin has witnessed his team excel on projects because of scaling adoption and innovation.

“We know [that if] you get the right people in the right context with the tools and the infrastructure and the domain knowledge, you can go really fast,” said Koplin.

He highlighted the success of Navy’s Flank Speed initiative, initially developed during the COVID-19 pandemic, which aimed to replicate the success of commercial virtual remote tools like Microsoft 365 in a secure environment. Partnering with other agencies within the DOD, Koplin’s team investigated how the success could be scale more broadly across the department.

“You can’t jump right to an enterprise service. You need to practice, you need to learn,” said Koplin. “We were able to really partner with them in that DevOps mode where the operators are driving … and we were able to scale that, and we kept on piloting.”

Koplin emphasized the importance of having people who can speak to the capabilities and trustworthiness of new tools or strategies is a part of strategic communication efforts. Providing open door conversations and over communicating increases transparency into the tech and the strategy supporting it.

“Doing all that on their behalf and then coming in as a trusted speaker in this realm is huge, and that’s really the key to adoption,” said Koplin. “They stand up and say, ‘no, I am telling you this thing is going to help, and it is going to make your life better.’”