GEOINTeraction Tuesday: It’s About Automation, Not AI

When NGA’s Deputy Director of Analysis steps to the front of a room and tells an audience of geospatial intelligence professionals that the community’s AI conversation has been asking the wrong question, it carries weight. Dr. Steve Hall is responsible for the analytic output of the nation’s primary geospatial intelligence agency, and on July 28 at USGIF’s Trajectory Event Center in Herndon, VA, he used that platform to deliver a pointed correction: the field’s fixation on AI has crowded out automation, and much of what gets marketed as AI is, in practice, “a script running in the background.”

The session, USGIF’s July GEOINTeraction Tuesday, sponsored by Raytheon, was itself a direct answer to feedback from this year’s GEOINT Symposium, where attendees had asked where analysis fit into the conversation. Sue Kalweit, USGIF Vice President of Programs, introduced Dr. Hall for the keynote, then joined him for a fireside chat and a Q&A that opened up to the room. An evening of networking preceded the program.

Decision Space Runs on Math

Collection is no longer the community’s problem. Imagery volume across national systems, commercial satellites, and every sensor class has reached a scale that was hypothetical on a whiteboard a decade ago. The real challenge now is making sense of it, and Dr. Hall’s answer is smarter automation, not simply more AI.

Decision space comes from decision advantage, Dr. Hall said, which comes from anticipating the adversary, which requires credible scenarios and simulations grounded in observed correlations, at a scale humans can’t carry alone. Data is growing exponentially, so a static analytic capability loses ground every day. That is where AI fits. Platforms handle the mathematical lift, then AI attacks the resulting scenarios and pokes every hole it can find. “That’s good. I want it. That makes us better analysts,” he said.

Dissemination, by contrast, is purely an automation and platform problem, solved with APIs that work, databases that aren’t siloed, and real interoperability. Analysts now carry more computing power in their hands than most desktops used to hold and consume information three seconds at a time, yet the community still produces long-form PDFs. Dr. Hall’s charge to his own team was dynamic, machine-readable intelligence delivered directly to increasingly digital command and control, built on automation rather than AI because automation is deterministic and reproducible in a way algorithms aren’t. “NGA is a combat support agency where speed is measured in seconds and minutes,” he said. “If the enterprise can’t go from data to insight to action within minutes, it has failed the warfighter.” His ask to industry followed the same logic: scalable, integrated pipelines to process structured data at scale, an enterprise challenge spanning NGA, NRO, and the broader coalition.

NGA’s acquisition cadence brings new capabilities on board in weeks under guidance to match commercial industry’s speed. He ended the point with a direct ask to the room: if industry thinks NGA can move faster, tell him.

The synergy of AI, automation, and tradecraft delivers the speed, scale, and precision the mission requires, he said. The data is there, the knowledge is there, and automation around big-data dissemination and validation is the underexploited half.

USGIF thanks Dr. Hall and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency for sharing his insights with the community, and thanks Raytheon for sponsoring July’s GEOINTeraction Tuesday program.

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