The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is making extensive use of artificial intelligence technologies to perform data and information triage, and to fulfill the open source information collection responsibilities that it handles for agencies across the Federal intelligence community, a top CIA official said on June 26 at the AWS Summit in Washington.
Lakshmi Raman, the CIA’s director of AI innovation, talked about the agency’s long-running use of AI tech during an interview segment with Dave Levy, vice president of Worldwide Public Sector at Amazon Web Services (AWS), during his keynote address at the event.
“Every day, the CIA is called upon to inform policymakers on a wide breadth of issues, and in order to derive those insights for policymakers, we have to go through vast amounts of data and information,” Raman said. “That means content triage is a huge part of what we have to do, and what we need AI to help us to do.”
On the content triage front, she said the agency is using AI tech to help with “things in the human language technology space – translation, transcription, all the types of processing that need to happen in order to help our analysts filter their data.”
Raman also talked about the agency’s use of AI tech – including generative AI technology – for its open source collection mission, which involves the systematic collection, processing, and dissemination of publicly available data to meet intelligence requirements.
“Imagine all of the news stories that come in every minute of every day from around the world – that is also the data that we are neck deep in, and then we’ve got to leverage AI in order to help us to manage,” Raman said.
“We really think about it in terms of search and discovery assistance, writing assistance, ideation, helping us with brainstorming,” Raman said in ticking off some of the advantages that AI tech delivers to the CIA.
“In addition to the actual pointy edge of the spear tools … we also need the foundational capabilities” of AI to help the agency deploy and catalog AI models, and work on training datasets, she said.
“It’s really about us creating that entire ecosystem for us to be able to leverage this to advance our mission and national security,” Raman said.
The CIA official also talked about the agency’s efforts to manage risks associated with AI use.
“We think about the risks quite a bit,” she said. “One of the risks we really think about is how will our users be able to use these technologies in a safe, secure, and trustworthy manner. That’s about making sure that they’re able to look at the output and validate it for accuracy.”
Raman also said she works closely with the agency’s Office of General Counsel and Office of Privacy and Civil Liberties on issues including AI-related bias.
“We want to make sure that our users feel very comfortable with” the technology, she said, “so they understand that what they’re seeing is AI-generated output.”
As for the impact of AI usage on the CIA’s operations, Raman said she sees the technology as “another tool in our toolbox to help us drive the human-machine teaming that is now so necessary for us to do our jobs.”
“We don’t see AI or technology as anything that’s going to replace our workforce, but we see it as something that is going to heavily augment our workforce, and help us accelerate our velocity in completing tasks so that we can leverage our minds for higher order work,” Raman said.
