A Systems Approach to Achieving the Benefits of Artificial Intelligence in UK Defence

The current resurgent interest in Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been driven by the availability of data (particularly labelled data), the democratisation of computing infrastructure and tooling, and the ability to combine these elements to create AI algorithms. Benefit is achieved once an algorithm is deployed into an operational system to achieve an operational advantage. The ability to exploit the opportunities offered by AI within UK Defence calls for an understanding of systemic issues required to achieve an effective operational capability. This paper provides the authors' views of issues which currently block UK Defence from fully benefitting from AI technology. These are situated within a reference model for the AI Value Train, so enabling the community to address the exploitation of such data and software intensive systems in a systematic, end to end manner. The paper sets out the conditions for success including: - Researching future solutions to known problems and clearly defined use cases; - Addressing achievable use cases to show benefit; - Enhancing the availability of Defence-relevant data; - Enhancing Defence'know how' in AI; - Operating Software Intensive supply chain ecosystems at required breadth and pace; - Governance and, the integration of software and platform supply chains and operating models.