Lakshmi Raman, chief artificial intelligence officer (CAIO) at the CIA, said on Tuesday that she’s excited about the potential of AI agents to further the cause of enterprise automation at the agency.
Speaking at the AWS Summit in Washington, D.C., on June 10, Raman was asked what AI trends or capabilities most excite her for possible agency applications, and the adoption of AI agents headed that list.
AI agents can be defined as systems that are designed to act autonomously to achieve stated goals with minimal human intervention – rather than relying on step-by-step instructions in the case of more traditional AI tech.
“I think the work that we can do to really accelerate enterprise automation is very exciting,” the CIA official said, while calling out use cases such as improving help desk capabilities.
“AI agents are really exciting to help us in our business use cases,” she said. “I think AI agents can help us fill out forms automatically that then we can go look and make sure it’s all been addressed and hit submit.”
“I think there’s a lot of opportunity there for us again to get the productivity gains that we’re looking for,” Raman said.
Elsewhere in her remarks, the CAIO tied in the role of agentic AI uses to what she spends a lot of her time thinking about – which is how AI is impacting the CIA workforce.
“One of the areas we’re looking at is what is the intersection between AI and our humans,” Raman said.
“We’re really looking at how humans and the AI are working together … where AI is able to speed up the processing to be able to do automation,” she said. “But at the end of the day, it’s really the humans who are taking out the risk, who are deciding the intent and are making the decisions … whatever the machine output happens to be.”
“Really it’s about the human who’s deciding the level of oversight, the risk to take, and even whether to intervene, if possible … that’s really where we are in our space,” Raman said.
On the workforce front, Raman the CIA is broadly looking “at people who can … live between the intersection of technology and human intelligence,” and “people who can understand how those two areas can potentially interact.”