JUST IN: Defense Intelligence Agency Rapidly Adopting AI Tools

JUST IN: Defense Intelligence Agency Rapidly Adopting AI Tools

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JUST IN: Defense Intelligence Agency Rapidly Adopting AI Tools

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Defense Intelligence Agency is moving out quickly to integrate artificial intelligence systems into its operations, the agency’s chief AI officer, Air Force Maj. Gen. Robert Kinney, said April 9. When Kinney arrived at the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2024, he found that DIA had AI initiatives underway, but some of them were “siloed in certain directorates, and there wasn't really, at the time, what I would call an enterprise enabler, something that can scale across the entire agency.” To address this gap, the agency in 2025 launched Task Force Sabre to serve as a pathfinder and accelerator of AI adoption within DIA, Kinney said during a keynote speech at the Special Competitive Studies Project’s AI+ Intelligence summit. The goal of the task force was to “go and learn some lessons that would inform where we needed to be as an agency, but the trick was to do that while also concurrently delivering,” he said. “We were in a build phase, not a rebuild phase.” The task force leveraged Other Transaction Authorities to acquire capabilities quickly without the “restrictions” of the Federal Acquisition Regulation, he said. In the last year, Task Force Sabre made six OTA awards, with the last one going from request for information to award in 40 days, he added. Building on the work of Task Force Sabre, the Defense Intelligence Agency in March stood up the Digital Modernization Accelerator, which Kinney described as a “hub-and-spoke concept.” The hub is the enterprise enabler that was missing previously, he said. It provides centralization, governance and financial decision-making as it relates to AI enablement in DIA. “It's where your more senior personnel are with those high-demand, low-density skill sets that are so hard to get in government … the tech folks,” he said. The spokes are the agency’s directorates and personnel at the combatant commands working closely with warfighters to generate mission-specific AI use cases, Kinney said. DIA has set up small mission integration teams that go to combatant commands to understand their “pain points” where AI can help improve their workflows, he said. “We did this as a pilot at Indo-Pacom in January, and it was a huge success,” he said. “We've deployed them to Stratcom, and we're moving out and building out several teams to be able to hit the combatant commands to get after the warfighters at the edge.” One capability the agency has delivered is ChatDIA, a large language model that was deployed in six months and has saved “hundreds of hours” of work, he said. The agency has also brought on board a small startup that has built an AI tool to assist with foreign disclosure officer reviews to determine whether to provide classified military information and controlled unclassified information to foreign governments and international