Intelligence agencies want to quickly deploy evolving artificial intelligence models and move beyond chatbots to agentic AI.

But agency chief AI officers, speaking at the annual DoDIIS summit in Tampa, Florida, this week, say they are taking a deliberate approach as they tackle acquisition challenges, security risks, and balancing speed with efficiency.

Maj. Gen. Robert Kinney, CAIO at the Defense Intelligence Agency, said DIA is currently undertaking a 90-day “sprint” to build the agency’s first enterprise AI platform. Kinney said DIA is also adopting Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open-source standard for connecting AI applications to external systems.

DIA is also “retooling” its ChatDIA capability to facilitate the use of MCP and agents, Kinney said.

“But thinking about it in the next year, building agents, and then agents with agents, is the direction that we want to go,” Kinney said during a Wednesday panel discussion at DoDIIS. “And there’s a whole other side to that on the compliance side, the security side, the zero trust side, that we’re going to work with our CIO teammates on.”

However, Kinney said “we’re in the very early stages of thinking through that,” adding “we’re not there yet with agents.”

DIA officials also have to consider the “tradecraft” of agents interacting with agents, Kinney said. The agency is looking to pair agents with “legacy data” before moving on to mission use cases, he added.

“That’s how we’re thinking about it, is in stages, building upon capabilities and capacity,” Kinney said. “You can’t you can’t just jump and deploy into mission apps. You can’t just jump and deploy into agents. You’ve got to build the underlying infrastructure first.”

Michelle Aten, CAIO at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, said NGA is focused on ensuring its data is “AI ready.”

“So that we can make sure that when we do pursue rapid acquisition and rapid integration, rapid deployment of our AI capabilities, that the data is ready for us to be able to use those capabilities immediately,” Aten said. “We don’t want data to be the long pole in the tent, and we all know that it is critically essential because data and AI are inextricably linked.”

NGA has also stood up a task force, “AI and Data Return on Investment Tracking” (ADROIT), focused on “aggressively” identifying the return on investment for AI capabilities, Aten said. She said NGA has made data calls and conducted interviews to identify its AI capabilities and benchmark them against key performance indicators.

“So that we can compare capabilities to one another, reduce redundancy, reduce duplication of effort, try to identify capabilities perhaps throughout the community that may be more performant or that NGA could offer to partners and colleagues,” Aten said.

Katie Noyes, the CAIO of the FBI, said the bureau has 139 AI use cases. The FBI’s “AI Review Board” is overseeing the law enforcement agency’s use of the technology.

“All of our AI applications that aren’t more common come through this AI review board, and we’re enabling our testing through that,” Noyes said.

The Office of Management and Budget has directed agencies to apply risk management approaches to “high-risk” AI use cases. Noyes said the FBI has been considering AI risks on a case-by-case approach.

“Testing a lot more operational data and backstopping or paralleling with a human process as well,” she said. “We’re getting a lot of really good outputs where we can take a little more risk, we have a little more trust, and then those where we have to go back to the drawing board, and it’s just not ready for an AI application.”

Intel agencies are also continuing to use non-traditional acquisition approaches to acquire AI capabilities.

DIA has been using its NeediPeDIA web portal and a recently established consortium to complete other transaction agreements, according to Kinney.

“We’ve done OTAs, eight or nine of them, and we’re able to do it now in a matter of weeks, and sometimes days if we have to, versus years and months,” he said.

Noyes said the FBI is trying to move beyond a reputation of being behind the curve on technology. She said the bureau is using a broad agency announcement to identify innovative commercial technologies. And in addition to OTAs, she said cooperative research and development agreements have allowed the FBI to connect more directly with technology experts.

“Now we can bring on that technology, we can benchmark and we can make an informed decision, and then follow that up with a lighter touch contracting pathway,” Noyes said.

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