Intelligence services Gabbard: AI has ‘profound’ effect on US expressed similar views about the impact of the intelligence cycle. At a technology-focused conference, Gabbard insisted that responsibly applied AI programs are vastly accelerating intelligence efforts, saving tax payer money and enabling intelligence officers to focus on more critical, human-centered work.
Gabbard, who oversees 18 intelligence agencies, has spoken out about the need to reform how the intelligence community operates. “Now, I was in Congress, trust me: Intell work is slow — always has been,” she said, adding, “But that’s really the fact that AI is amplifying.”
One of the examples given by Gabbard is the move to pick up the pace of declassifying documents. Her office has released tens of thousands of pages of material related to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy.
Experts had said the process could take years, but the AI-assisted analysis has sped it up by quickly scanning through documents to find anything that should stay classified as sensitive. “We’ve been able to achieve that with AI tools far more rapidly than what had previously been done, which was to have humans go through and look at every single one of these pages,” Gabbard said.
Declassification aside, AI is also being used for HR programs, and beyond. GABBARD: We have the greatest minds in the tech industry here in the United States that are working already with the federal government on these issues of national security and how we can keep the American people safe, and with AI/HA we also have the advantageous place of having others who are working on these issues within the private sector.
She described a future where intelligence professionals are able to use off-the-shelf private-sector tools, to spend their time and resources doing intelligence gathering and analysis –the jobs that only humans can do.
DNI Gabbard’s comments reflect a trend toward increased usage of cutting-edge technology to drive the effectiveness and efficiency of the U.S. intelligence community, and a move toward AI as an industry-standard to solve complex intelligence problems.
