I N THE LAST decade, artificial intelligence (AI)  has progressed from near–science fiction to  common reality across a range of business  applications. In intelligence analysis, AI is already  being deployed to label imagery and sort through  vast troves of data, helping humans see the signal  in the noise.1 But what the intelligence community  (IC) is now doing with AI is only a glimpse of what  is to come. These early applications point to a  future in which smartly deployed AI will  supercharge analysts’ ability to extract value  from information.

The adoption of AI has been driven not only by  increased computational power and new  algorithms but also the explosion of data now  available. By 2020, the World Economic Forum  expects there to be 40 times more bytes of digital  data than there are stars in the observable  universe.2  For intelligence analysts, that  proliferation of data means surefire information  overload. Human analysts simply cannot cope with  that much data. They need help.