After nearly a year of piloting its digital “concierge AI” platform the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) is ready to begin testing the platform within the agency, DISA’s technology lead said today.
DISA began piloting its ‘Concierge AI’ platform – an artificial intelligence (AI) prototype – to serve as a digital concierge to enhance its workforce’s capabilities earlier this year.
“We got permission to start testing it within the agency about a week ago. We’re working to get it opened up to the greater DISA team. So, we’re working on some internal things right now,” Steve Wallace, director of emerging technology and chief technology officer at DISA, told reporters at an agency conference in Towson, Md.
Concierge AI aims to integrate data with AI and minimize friction for users to find and analyze data.
According to Wallace, the tool’s functions will help improve decision making processes. The digital concierge will take data from controlled unclassified information settings and drop them into a database where – with the help of large language models (LLMs) – that database will present users with answers.
DISA’s goal is to feed internal instructions and related data into the LLM database, and let users ask questions and receive accurate answers.
“We learned a lot over the last year [and] what I’m hopeful of is the architecture that the team put in place [so] we can begin to stamp out these knowledge bases,” Wallace said.
The program’s initial pilot provided security personnel and users with “a level of comfort” in using LLMs in a government cloud environment at Impact Level 5.
However, there were some challenges concerning how the data was ingested. For example, the database didn’t respond well to tables and tables of contents.
“It goes back to learning about data grooming, because if we load it with a bunch of garbage policies, the user’s not going to have a very good experience” Wallace said. “They’re going to have a bad outcome. So, making sure that we hit it right out of the gate is going to be critical.”
According to Wallace, DISA’s policies and instructions from DISA’s J1 team will be the first of many documents uploaded in the LLM. But many other teams within the agency have shown interest in testing the AI platform, he said.
