Like never before, technology is putting new capabilities into our hands. Perhaps nowhere is this more pronounced – or more impactful – than when it comes to the evolving and expanding capabilities now available to America’s intelligence analysts.

And we would know. Before coming to GDIT, we built our careers on analyzing information and turning it into actionable insights. Today, software, machine learning, artificial intelligence and automation tools are accelerating the timeline from observation to action. The technology-enabled insights and real-time information prioritization now makes every analyst infinitely more powerful and efficient.

Doing More, Faster and Better

Large language models and AI-driven tools allow analysts to quickly synthesize data, ask questions of it, and generate new, deeper, or more precise questions to ask. Analysts can move quicker than ever, begin their research efforts already “on third base,” as the saying goes, and in the process, they can save more of their most precious resource: time.

Aided by automation, analysts today are also better able to deploy resources and to improve collection methods. They can perform better targeting, analysis, and post-mission assessment. Analytic platforms are capable of ingesting and rapidly processing all kinds of data – geographic data, weather data, message traffic, sensor data, and more – and generating dynamic, real-time visualizations. We’ve never before had the ability to operationalize intelligence data so quickly.

Technology Needs Talent and Trust

At the same time, this acceleration of technical capabilities has grown – not decreased – the need for highly skilled people. Teams today need coders, database architects and managers, machine learning experts and data scientists in addition to people who understand the mission. Technology will never replace humans in analysis, but it is changing how we collect and assess intelligence, and it is enabling us to do more with our resources – whether that’s people, time, or information.

Additionally, technology is engendering a paradigm shift in the intelligence community. The first part of that shift involves understanding that emerging technology’s primary benefit is not to automate someone out of a job. Instead, technology enables us to tackle the insatiable appetite for intelligence with increasingly limited resources. Budget constraints are real, but requirements don’t change. Understanding how technology can enable every analyst to be more productive and become even more essential is key. The second important shift is about trusting that the technology will perform as well as a human would and can be depended upon in mission-critical situations. Performance breeds trust and when teams can experiment with tools that demonstrate their value, adopting them becomes much easier.

Choosing the Right Mission Accelerators & Mission Partners

The use of new technologies or systems meant to accelerate our analytic capabilities must, of course, adhere to military doctrine and principles. Whether for Geospatial Intelligence Imagery Analysts, Geospatial Engineers, all-source intelligence analysis, ISR planning, or target development, these tools must be fit to operate in mission-critical environments and must meet the military’s unique performance and security standards.

Similarly, partners in the development and deployment of these tools need to understand and embrace the mission and the environments in which intelligence teams operate. These partners can leverage systems and tools that fit the mission, rather than repurposing something fit for another mission. Working side by side with mission owners, GDIT works with our intelligence community customers day in and day out – and has for the last 25 years.

With careful attention to accelerated analysis, talent and trust, and choosing the right tools and partners – we believe it is possible to give every analyst next-generation analytic capabilities to meet their rapidly growing missions