DISA soon prototyping AI ‘concierge’ for agency

WASHINGTON — The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) will soon pilot a prototype using artificial intelligence to serve as a “digital concierge” for its workforce, an agency official said today. 

Speaking at a panel at an AFCEA event, Steve Wallace, chief technology officer and director of DISA’s emerging technology directorate, explained that with an AI digital concierge, “the idea there is the ability to take [Controlled Unclassified Information] documents or any number of sources and … drop them into what’s called a vendor database and then have a large language model bang against that database and present the user with answers.”

Using AI as a “digital concierge” was first mentioned by Wallace to reporters in November last year during a DISA Forecast to Industry event. He said then that large language models would help the workforce “in all aspects of their job.”

“Whether that be back office work, or whether that be, say, the analyst sitting on the floor and that ability to quickly diagnose and deal with things,” he said.

Wallace told Breaking Defense following the panel that the AI concierge will allow DISA staff “to ask questions about official documents … bringing the DISA knowledge base a bit more together and helping the knowledge-sharing across the users.”

As for the timeline for the prototype, Wallace said that he expects it to launch in the first half of this year, but the agency is currently working through some issues before it can get up and running. 

“Right now we’re going through dealing with some of the security challenges,” he told Breaking Defense. “So I’m hoping the first half of this calendar year. The sooner … the better. So I don’t have a definitive date but …June would be my expectation.”

Brian Hermann, DISA’s program executive officer for cyber, told reporters in November that the agency was looking at how AI can help its defensive cyber operator analysts. He said that AI could automate nearly 80 percent of the data the analysts review.

“And then their brains can be applied to those really high-end problems,” Hermann said at the time. “And I would argue that that’s really the only way we could react with speed to appear competitive.”

At the same time DISA is figuring out the best way to use AI, the Defense Department is also pushing ahead with exploring ways the technology can be utilized and pushing for responsible deployment. In November, DoD released its Data, Analytics, and AI Adoption Strategy to accelerate the department’s adoption of AI capabilities, taking into account things like large language models.