Demonstrating AI use cases to unlock new opportunities in UK Defence
Ministry of Defence
We worked with Dstl to help the MOD enhance their Defence capabilities, while effectively navigating security and assurance hurdles.
Background
AI is rapidly becoming a key differentiator in defence. Adversaries and allies increasingly rely on it to help them enhance operational capabilities, speed up decision-making and gain strategic advantages. The Ministry of Defence (MOD) sought to work collaboratively with industry experts to navigate the high stakes involved in deploying AI technologies, as well as the necessary strict rules on security and assurance. The Defence AI Centre Experimentation Hub (DAIC-X) was established to leverage AI technologies to enhance defence capabilities and maximise the UK’s strategic advantage.
"We're incredibly proud to help DAIC-X do more than just experiment with AI technologies. We brought experts, end users and ethicists into the delivery cycle and solved the key problems of trust, assurance, safety and security that often stop AI crossing ‘the valley of death'.”
Ross Adams
Customer Director at Faculty
Solution
We tested AI solutions with a selection of use cases where non-AI methods had failed to solve the challenges. These included whether automated behaviour could be programmed onto a UAV, computer vision object detection from satellites, open source intelligence using language models, and radio frequency signal classification using machine-learning techniques.
Impact
This project accelerated development of AI in MOD by proving its value to users and stakeholders. It also laid the foundation (prototypes, requirements, feasibility considerations) for a bespoke secure large language model (LLM) for MOD use, which will further accelerate adoption and equip UK Defence to be AI-ready.
"We were extremely pleased to have Faculty as a key part of our Agile Delivery Partner team. Faculty brought strong technical expertise in AI and ML and this enabled us to develop impressive AI prototypes that have accelerated the adoption of AI in Defence."