Secure, Trusted, Easy to Procure AI is Needed Now More Than Ever

Last week, I attended the Potomac Officers Club’s 2026 Intel Summit. For one afternoon, dozens of intelligence leaders, mission partners and technologists gathered to talk about the state of our industry and the trends that will shape its future. The event convened speakers from multiple national security agencies and the private sector organizations that support them. Topics ranged from how to govern agentic AI systems, to how to take them from pilot to production to the edge, and how the intersection of AI and quantum computing will impact analysts working with classified data or in classified environments.

Talking with attendees and listening to remarks from the stage, one clear takeaway was this: the conversation about AI has moved from a forward-looking one to a very present-focused one, and the need for ways to operationalize AI – quickly – in order to meet the mission.

Perhaps that’s no surprise given the rapid adoption of AI technology in both the Intelligence and Defense communities. The Department of War has a goal of achieving a 75 percent adoption rate for enterprise AI tools by September 2027. The department itself plans to fully launch a new military command dedicated to artificial intelligence and autonomous systems by October of that year. CISA’s artificial intelligence mandate focuses on prioritizing AI-enabled cyber defenses, securing AI systems by design, and establishing frameworks to manage AI-driven vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure.

AI is becoming the essential backbone of our national intelligence and defense infrastructures. That’s a good thing and it’s right for us to move as swiftly as possible to maintain the advantage over our adversaries. That’s why many of the presentations and the organic conversations in the room were about how to rapidly procure mission-moving AI solutions, how to trust the results they generate, and how to ensure the security of the data moving through AI solutions as well as the solutions themselves.

Never has the need for secure, dynamic, trustable AI been more front and center – and never has it been more important to operationalize how we use AI to surface risk in an intelligence context. For us at Finch AI, that means continuing to leverage our brand of entity intelligence to uncover relationships, patterns and insights in massive volumes of data and showing end users how we found them. It’s continuing to demonstrate how a robust ecosystem of capabilities enables rapid, multi-dimensional discovery on corpuses of data that are constantly changing. It’s about meeting the analyst and accelerating their workflow – because they can’t miss. The stakes are high and the margin for error is zero.

We see this moment as both an opportunity and an obligation to partner with agencies to bring them technology solutions that move at the speed of the mission. That means not only delivering powerful capabilities, but making them accessible, adaptable, and easier to put into the hands of the people doing the work.  The pace of change is accelerating, and it will never be this slow again. The entire team at Finch AI looks forward to helping transform how intelligence is collected, analyzed, operationalized and trusted. For our customers, we combine domain expertise, flexibility and powerful technology to solve complex problems and to make every analyst exponentially more powerful.

To learn more about how we do that and how we can help you, visit www.finchai.com.