Understanding world leaders is one of the CIA’s most important jobs. Analysts comb through intelligence collected by spies and publicly available information to create profiles of leaders that can predict behaviours. A chatbot powered by artificial intelligence now helps do that work.
Over the past two years, the CIA has developed a tool that allows analysts to talk to virtual versions of foreign presidents and PMs, who answer back. “It is a fantastic example of an app that we were able to rapidly deploy and get out to production in a cheaper, faster fashion,” said Nand Mulchandani, the CIA’s chief technology officer (CTO).
The chatbot is part of the spy agency’s drive to improve the tools available to CIA analysts and its officers in the field, and to better understand adversaries’ technical advances. Core to the effort is to make it easier for companies to work with the most secretive agency.
William Burns, CIA director for the past four years, prioritised improving the agency’s technology and understanding of how it is used. Incoming Trump administration officials say they plan to build on those initiatives, not tear them down.
Under Burns, the agency created a technology-focused mission centre to better understand the technology being used by China and other adversaries. And it hired Mulchandani, who helped found a series of successful startups before joining the Pentagon’s AI centre, as the agency’s first chief technology officer. His mandate over the past two and a half years was to make it easier for private companies that had developed new technologies to be able to sell those applications and tools to the CIA.
Many offices in the CIA are warrens of cubicles or have clusters of desks for assistants. When Mulchandani started, he was given a space on the same floor as the CIA’s top leadership, but he was not pleased. He was turned off by the small offices, the lack of natural light and the closetlike rooms for viewing the most classified of material. He ordered a renovation.
The old offices were replaced by different spaces with movable desks for meetings and exchanging ideas. The goal was to make a space that echoed the workplaces of Silicon Valley — and signal to visiting entrepreneurs that the agency was ready to change. “The space is going to drive the culture, a culture of talking,” Mulchandani said. “A slice of Silicon Valley on the seventh floor.”
To study world leaders, CIA chats with their AI clones – The Times of India
