Defending the Realm…one LLM at a time

Last week, in an undisclosed location in the City of London, about 550 people crammed into a lobby designed for 50 as they awaited collection of their name badges. As the queue slowly snaked towards the welcome desks and the clock ticked down to the unachievable 0900 start time, a brief look at those assembled was jarring to say the least. The invite stipulated ‘smart business attire’ and at one of the extreme you had neatly pressed military uniforms and the brown chinos and tweed jackets that is the un-official uniform of serving Army officers the world over, trying their best at blending in with the civvies. At the other end of the dress code spectrum, you had jeans, ¾ zip jumpers and the very coolest of box-fresh trainers on display. Obviously, the author was in that second category! This was the place where the very latest AI tech meets the most forward-leaning bits of defence and national security. This was DAIC Connect 2025.

The UK’s Defence AI Centre Connect Conference, now on its second iteration, was massively oversubscribed, necessitating a last-minute venue change and the very un-military logistics kerfuffle, trying to get everyone through the front doors on time. 

For some it may come as a complete surprise that the British military even has an AI centre, let-alone a massive interest and growing industrial and academic support base surrounding it. The Defence AI Centre (DAIC) is part of the wider Ministry of Defence machine that sits within one of the four fighting commands - Strategic Command - alongside the likes of the Special Forces and some of the other enabling functions that are at the sharp end of keeping the UK and her allies safe and secure. DAIC is officially responsible for the “enablement and acceleration of ambitious, safe, and responsible AI adoption across UK Defence”. But what does that actually mean? Well, it works collaboratively alongside other parts of government, industry partners at the cutting edge of AI development and deployment, and academia, all to provide a “strategic advantage” in the field of AI. 

The theme for this conference was not immediately clear. Lots of chatter around ethics and even more on procurement processes, specifically the need to accelerate the adoption and logistical support to get smaller businesses on-boarded and working with defence quicker. So far, no real news, as if you go to any military-based conference these will be the two consistent and most contested conversations you will encounter every time. 

Where things did get interesting was on the subject of skills and integrating AI into the tools and capabilities used by the serving front-end soldier, sailor or aviator. You see, AI adoption for defence is critical. Our adversaries are working very hard to gain advantage and to dominate the virtual and physical battlespace though faster adoptions and greater use of new and emerging capabilities underpinned by AI. For the UK, not keeping pace, or not gaining our own significant advantage is simply not a viable option in the minds of those senior officers and industry leaders that spoke at the conference. We are at an inflection point and the UK knows it needs to invest more, but crucially, that greater investment in AI needs to translate into an increased ability to project deterrence, and if necessary, lethality on an enemy that is both sophisticated and well versed in arts of this new warfare. 

And it was on these points that UK defence is clear-eyed on what needs to be done in terms of changing the dynamic and “doing things differently”. We will need to stop thinking in terms of our Prime Integrators being the final arbiters of capability delivery into MOD Main Building. We will need to develop a coherent way for smart, nimble and hungry start-ups, scale-ups and proto-primes to lead the charge and deliver direct to front-end commands, and to change the norm from ‘Primes versus SME’s’ to ‘Primes and SME’s.’ 

Key to all this is of course skills. The brutal truth is there are not enough people with the right skills, at the right level, with the right vetting clearances and with the right levels of motivation to spread evenly across defence and the industrial and academic base. Therefore, if defence can’t buy the talent it needs to work exclusively on its ever more complex challenge set, then it is going to have to strike new deals and offer more efficient ways to engage and incentivise smaller businesses to operate alongside it, than it currently is able to. 

And this is where the DAIC really comes into its own and is why the Connect Conference is a such a showcase for how the UK is tackling this knotty problem. DAIC Connect brought together that rather incredulous collection of military minds, investors, innovators, start-ups through to primes, and all manner of AI specialists to forge a collective understanding and shared narrative that we are all in this together, we need to find better approaches and it isn’t up to the MOD in isolation to do that. 

So, what can we learn from this? Firstly, defence procurement is still too slow, and as hard as it tries to adapt and reform, the more start-ups, scale-ups and proto-primes it attracts, the higher the expectation becomes for the MOD to be better prepared and better resourced to move faster. Let’s face it, Ukraine does it! Secondly, that AI skills are not a commodity MOD is likely to be able to keep pace with, so if you are a small business and an aspiring AI partner to MOD, now is a good time to be demonstrating where you add value…the need and desire is there, as is the dawning realisation that they need you more now, than ever before! Thirdly, that there is definitely a real and active defence and security AI community here in the UK, it’s growing, it’s strengthening and it’s gaining its voice. 

I expect the queues for the next conference to be spilling out onto the street!