Officials Cite Empathy, Clarity, Curiosity for Gen AI Growth

Pentagon officials opened up about some of the adoption challenges around generative artificial intelligence as the tool shows promise for defense applications.

Alexis Bonnell, CIO and director of the Digital Capabilities Directorate at the Air Force Research Laboratory, said her agency’s AI journey includes the core values of “empathy, curiosity and clarity.”

“One of the things I think that’s really important about empathy is that as a human existence, it is natural that we create tools that respond to the stressors,” Bonnell said at the NVIDIA AI Summit in Washington, D.C. last week. When we were looking at our journey it’s been about, how do we help people get over the fear and find those minutes on mission back?”

To Bonnell, improving employee’s relationship with AI can make them more confident in the technology, which can lead to outcomes where employees are “curating with abandon, and propagating with intentions.”

“One of the moments I know that will be successful in gen AI is when I can look and say someone has gone from being afraid to being informationally greedy — when they tell me this tool isn’t enough. It’s not giving me the relationship with knowledge I want to have,” she said.

Army CIO Leonel Garciga said he encourages commanders to use the technology and find out its best use cases.

“From a policy perspective, I was pretty clear. I told the Army, ‘run.’ Commanders, my expectation is you’re going to go use this technology,” Garciga said. “I want you to help teach us what the right way to do, what use cases make sense and help us build out some capability with certain constraints.”

Army Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology Young Bang said that in order for the Army to fully use gen AI, industry needs to settle on a reasonable cost that the Army can afford.

“We do know that technology is going to be critical to enable our digital transformation, but we don’t have an unlimited budget,” Bang said. “What we need is help from industry to help figure out the table stakes we’re working on right now to make sure people can actually connect with that and figure out how to make their lives easier. We need your help to look at other things and advances faster so we can get things more toward autonomy, not automation.”

Bang noted how ranging costs of AI solutions in the industry created some inconsistency in acquisition and wants to align to a business model that the industry can agree on.

DOD Emerging Technology Directorate CTO Stephen Wallace emphasized that generative AI tools are designed to “help us get rid of the toil” and sees opportunity in sharing development work across the agency.

“One of the things we’ve seen inside of our agency is you have a lot of folks … that are super excited about the tech, and they’re off to the races, in many cases, duplicating each other’s work,” Wallace said. “How do we get them aligned with the larger push toward how we maximize effectiveness of all that brainpower versus solving the same problem six times?”

Wallace lauded the push in industry to create generative AI solutions and compared it to the government-led push to propagate the internet.

“If you look at the dawn of the internet, that came from the department, that came from a lot of the governmental work. A lot of this work that we are now taking advantage of actually came from industry,” Wallace said.