Artificial Intelligence is everywhere and growing in its proliferation into our everyday lives. Whether it is recommendations from Spotify or Amazon – ‘customers who bought that also bought this’, the chatbot on your mobile provider’s website or use of a smart data analytics programme to help better deployment of valuable resources during the COVID-19 pandemic – AI is everywhere.

The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) has recently published its report “Artificial Intelligence and UK National Security” in which its extensive research across the UK Intelligence community found that whilst AI provides a wealth of opportunities for UK Intelligence across multiple areas, considerations around privacy and human rights remain forefront in any AI implementation, and have ultimately limited its use to date.

Furthermore, Pega carried out an in depth survey across North America, UK, Australia, Japan, Germany, and France around the public’s perception of “AI and Empathy” and its findings were reasonably damning for AI and how it really can and does benefit individuals and society as a whole. The report highlighted a general distrust of machine decision making versus humans “69% say they would be more inclined to tell the truth to a person rather than AI”, there was also a sizeable minority where “maybe science fiction’s portrayal of AI has influenced some … 27% cited the rise of robots and enslavement of humanity as a concern”. Moreover, and a key concern for national security agencies, 54% “believe it’s possible for AI to show bias in the way it makes decisions”.

The Benefits of AI for the intelligence community

The Pega and RUSI papers both highlight major obstacles in the roll out of AI to help transform organisations. These obstacles and perceptions can and will hinder AI’s deployment and future use.

AI currently plays a role and brings benefit to our national security effort against the ever-growing and increasingly sophisticated threat. The use of AI varies across a number of aligned partner organisations, where some find it is a major help in delivering their operational activities, while others remain a little more cautious and sceptical.  Either way, benefits are delivered and will only increase as understanding, confidence and trust grows in this enabling and supportive capability.

As shown in the diagram opposite from the RUSI AI report, the use of AI across the intelligence sector can support the efficient internal workings of any organisation, from day to day accounting, logistics and compliance, to the defensive support of our national cyber security infrastructure, through to smarter intelligence analytics – such as open source natural language processing and behavioural analytics.

It is, however, clear from the research, that without human support and judgement, AI lacks public trust in the benefits that it can bring to society as a whole.

Therefore, any AI strategy and implementation must have the concerns of individuals whether this is data privacy, or the concerns around machine bias at its very core. This then combined with experienced data scientists, alongside front line human understanding and know how, is an absolute imperative.

At Digilanti we have been working with AI and machine learning tools for over 2 decades, harnessing the benefits that such systems and intelligence can bring to bear for any organisation – large or small. Get in touch on the form below to discuss further how we can help your organisation develop and implement the best possible strategy for any AI deployment.