Defence declares "absolute acceleration" in its AI adoption

Defence is three months into an “absolute acceleration” in its adoption of artificial intelligence, coinciding with better internal coordination and early work under its AI chief.

Speaking at a joint select committee hearing on AI on Friday, Defence’s chief AI and information officer Chris Crozier indicated the department is seeing early results from an improved understanding of its AI work.

Crozier, who was appointed CIO in mid-2023, is now also the department’s chief AI officer, a shared responsibility he has held for about 12 weeks.

“In recognition of my role and it being a direct appointment from the [Defence] secretary as well as CDF [Chief of the Defence Force], and the absolute alignment that we have now across our entire leadership org around the impact of AI, we have seen an absolute acceleration in the last three months in terms of our application and adoption of AI technologies within the Defence organisation,” Crozier said. 

“Not to say that we were not working at pace, but it is very clear that we absolutely need to be working within the organisation and with the best organisations and our Five Eyes partners for offensive and defensive elements of this [technology].”

Crozier said that in his first three months as AI chief, he - alongside others within the department - had “interviewed over 60 representatives within Defence that are actively engaged in the application of artificial intelligence.”

“We have a comprehensive portfolio now of our engagements around that,” he said.

“My role is to ensure that we have coherence, that we understand from a warfighting perspective as well as a business productivity perspective the elements associated with the technology we’re utilising, the architecture, the capabilities we’re developing and how we’re then generating the results that can then scale.”

Crozier said that Defence is presently relying on the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) to broker access to frontier AI models.

“There are exquisite capabilities within frontier models that are absolutely essential to maintain the sovereignty of this nation,” he said.

“I think it’s imperative that we maintain our relationships with those organisations that provide frontier models.

“ASD has that clear pathway at this point in time, [and] Defence will leverage the models.”

However, he noted that they “are not the be-all and end-all” when it comes to achieving good outcomes from AI.

“A good [open-source, open weight] model plus an excellent ‘harness’ [the software scaffolding connecting the model to an organisation’s systems and data] will give you a tremendous outcome,” he said, adding that “at an aggregate level that’s where we’re focusing within Defence.”