Artificial Intelligence Will Still Need Training in the Field, Deputy Defense CIO Says

If the Defense Department is going to build and deploy artificial intelligence, service members from top brass to the battlefield will need to get comfortable using tools that have yet to prove capable, according to a Pentagon IT official. That will need to change if the department hopes to harness AI, according to Peter Ranks, Pentagon deputy CIO for information enterprise. "AI algorithms often go into the field when they are less than 50% effective; when they still have a significant amount of training where they have to encounter real users and real data in order to make them better," Ranks said during a keynote at the Professional Services Council's 2019 Vision conference. "That is out of sync with the way we deploy weapons systems in the DOD." Ranks noted that most of the work being done within the Defense Department today is still focused on research and development.