While some sectors debate viable use cases and appropriate investment levels for artificial intelligence, federal government buyers are in a great position to act fast around AI adoption. They have unique use cases and skill sets that align very well with today’s set of AI capabilities and technologies. And as the field continues to push forward, savvy government agencies will be well positioned to use AI to streamline their operations, implement new abilities, and — most importantly — improve quality of life for their citizens.
We’re not talking just about automated customer service agents or chatbots that can answer simple tax questions. We’re talking about mission-critical deployments that can keep countries safer and vastly improve efficiency. But getting there requires investing in an infrastructure foundation that can support the true promise of AI applications. More specifically, it requires rethinking the role of data from something to be stored to the fuel that powers our national priorities.
The list of potentially game-changing use cases is long, but here are three very real ones that can have an immediate impact today and set up governments to succeed for decades.
1. Powering new defense tech
The technology of warfare is changing before our eyes. Nowhere is this more clear than with the advent of attritable drones and other cheap, autonomous weapons and surveillance systems. Potentially small in stature, packed with sensors, and costing a fraction of traditional military aircraft, unmanned aerial vehicles open up some entirely new capabilities while slashing the price tag of some existing ones.
However, those are also the exact characteristics that help UAVs level the playing field between traditional military powers and everybody else. Building an operational UAV advantage requires building an infrastructure platform that can handle the sheer scale of data these craft transmit. While data volume alone is important, it’s the ability to process and analyze data in real time that provides an asymmetric AI-powered advantage.
For example, VAST is working with the Department of Defense on ingesting and processing synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data that UAVs and satellites collect. SAR data allows the DoD to build 3D models from 2D images — including the ability to see through walls and recreate the structures inside a room. More traditional military hardware — such as jet fighters, boats, and land vehicles — are also equipped with more sensors than ever, and are moving toward greater autonomy.
The common thread among all of them is the need for real-time ingestion, processing, and analysis of all the data they’re generating. This is what allows AI systems to learn and infer from their present context, and allows human operators to make fast, informed decisions about how to act in life-or-death situations.
2. Conducting cybersecurity at scale
Beyond hot wars and intelligence gathering, cybersecurity is an increasingly important national security concern. An attack on critical infrastructure (e.g., utility providers) or cyberinfrastructure (e.g., internet nodes) could cripple even advanced nations, and secure networks are a linchpin of military communications both at home and in the field. However, it’s impossible for human analysts and traditional threat-detection tools to keep up with the scale of data crossing the wires and the increasing sophistication of cyberattacks.
The DoD relies on VAST to capture and log massive volumes of defense-network data, so its Security Operations Centers and Network Operations Centers can analyze packets as close to real-time as possible. Imagine armies of AI agents trained on historical threat patterns, always learning from new data, and either flagging or acting on threat behavior in seconds. Instead of learning about breaches after it’s too late, we can intercept and mitigate before damage is done.
From energy to law enforcement, though, the risk of cyber threats has never been greater across government agencies as a whole. AI agents deployed broadly and strategically can bring this level of network security to other agencies, as well as help maintain secure software supply chains and uncover potentially important threat patterns hidden in troves of historical data.
Infrastructure decisions can also play a foundational role in an organization’s security posture. For example, VAST’s security-first architecture allows our customers to operate multitenant clusters without fear of unauthorized access even across different internal teams. And our approach to row-, column-, and table-level access control helps keep data safe even as people (and, increasingly, AI agents) access critical systems from different locations.
3. Modernizing and standardizing systems
If there’s one thing that government IT is known for, it’s disparate, antiquated systems that often don’t play nicely with each other. This creates any number of inefficiencies, from making simple tasks far too onerous to restricting cross-agency collaboration on important issues. When people complain about government inefficiency, outdated IT systems are certainly a culprit.
They can also lead to security holes as threats evolve, people retire, and old systems are left unattended. Isolated data storage and databases are only as secure as the people and processes maintaining them. However, as noted above, modern data platforms can help alleviate many of the security and data-access concerns that lead to this system sprawl.
Once standardization takes hold, though, it also opens up new avenues for cross-team and cross-agency collaboration; greater efficiencies around data management (from sensitive operations down to new paperwork filings); and easier recruitment for technical roles (there are many more people proficient in modern protocols and languages).
Of course, deploying modern data systems also means you can implement new technologies like AI much faster. Getting rid of rigid data formats, capacity concerns, and performance limitations is necessary to do generative AI — and AI agents, in particular — in a meaningful way. Whatever the agency and whatever the application, though, there are almost certainly uses for a system that can free up human resources by reasoning across structured data, PDFs, images, and other modalities.
The time to modernize is now
We’re happy to be working with our current government customers and partners across a number of cutting-edge cases, but there’s more work to be done. And much of this work starts at the infrastructure level, with systems that can handle the scale of AI and with architectures that can span local, cloud, and/or hybrid environments without sacrificing security or performance. This type of foundation opens the door for AI applications that will help keep us safe and capture new opportunities.
If you want to learn more about how VAST Data Federal can help power your mission-critical AI strategy, visit us at NVIDIA GTC DC, Booth #339.
