Whitaker was acting attorney general from November 2018 to February 2019 during Trump’s first term. He also previously served as chief of staff in the Justice Department and as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Iowa. Additionally, he’s been co-chair for the Center of Law & Justice at the America First Policy Institute and of counsel at Graves Garrett Greim, among other positions. He also ran for political office as a Republican candidate and appeared at rallies for Trump’s presidential campaign.

“Matt is a strong warrior and loyal Patriot, who will ensure the United States’ interests are advanced and defended. Matt will strengthen relationships with our NATO Allies, and stand firm in the face of threats to Peace and Stability – He will put AMERICA FIRST,” Trump said in a statement. “I have full confidence in Matt’s ability to represent the United States with Strength, Integrity, and unwavering Dedication. I look forward to working closely with him as we continue to promote PEACE THROUGH STRENGTH, Freedom, and Prosperity around the World.”

Trump has been a critic of NATO and pressured other member nations to spend more on defense.

If confirmed by the Senate, Whitaker would play a key role in the alliance as it pursues a wide range of modernization efforts to counter advanced threats — including from Russia and elsewhere — such as the adoption of artificial intelligence capabilities and other digital tools and emerging technologies for military applications.

NATO officials are ramping up the Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (DIANA) initiative, which aims to boost cooperation on emerging tech and foster a far-reaching innovation network, with a particular focus on supporting startups.

The military pact is also looking to bolster data security and plans to publish its first commercial space strategy next year, among other efforts.

For most of the Biden administration, Julianne Smith served as U.S. ambassador to NATO. She left that post last month.

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The DIANA initiative, which was launched in 2022 and has its main office in London, aims to boost alliance cooperation on emerging tech and foster a far-reaching innovation network. It’s particularly focused on supporting startups. Its board of directors is chaired by Barbara McQuiston, a former senior Pentagon science and technology official.

The initial cohort for DIANA included 44 vendors, and now 10 of those have been tapped to move into phase two based on their ability to “demonstrate progress in their commercial and defence market potential, the technical viability and novelty of their solutions, and their investment readiness,” according to a NATO release.

A senior NATO communications official previously told DefenseScoop that phase two will be focused on “scaling up.”

One of the companies chosen for the next phase, Dolphin Labs, is headquartered in the U.S. and has developed an xNode wave energy converter. The technology “generates persistent, renewable electricity to enable remote ocean sensing networks, subsea microgrids and communications. This new class of expeditionary technology enables enhanced maritime domain awareness to improve the safety and security for our offshore natural resources and critical infrastructure,” according to a description included in a NATO release.

“To respond to a changing world, DIANA is identifying, developing and deploying dual-use, emerging and disruptive technologies with the power to reduce the risk of conflict, and mitigate its impacts,” the company said in a LinkedIn post Tuesday. “Dolphin Labs looks forward to working with the DIANA team over the next six months to boost the commercialization and adoption of our innovation.”

Four U.K.-based vendors were also tapped: Aquark Technologies, which focuses on improving the size, weight, power and cost of quantum devices; cybersecurity firm Goldilock; IONATE, which builds tech for smart grids; and semiconductor company SECQAI.

Other selectees include Lithuania-based Astrolight, an innovator in high-bandwidth laser communication; Italy-based Ephos, which designs and manufactures glass-based integrated photonic circuits to power computing, communications and sensing devices; Netherlands-based Lobster Robotics, a maker of underwater drones that can do high-resolution mapping of sea beds; Canada-based Phantom Photonics, which develops quantum sensing solutions for 3D imaging; and Poland-based REVOBEAM, which specializes in production of “intelligent” antennas that can be used to enable unmanned systems, according to the NATO release.

The 10 companies will each receive an additional 300,000 euros for phase two – significantly more than the 100,000 euros each of the 44 vendors initially chosen for the first cohort received to work on their technologies.

“To solve complex security and resilience problems, we need an ecosystem of creative, collaborative innovators willing to bring their talent and expertise to bear. These ten innovators, and indeed all of our first cohort, are paving the way for a strong pipeline of innovation for Allied nations to adopt,” Deeph Chana, DIANA’s managing director, said in a statement.

Adrian Dan, chief commercial officer for the initiative, said the vendors tapped for the next phase have emerging tech with “high adoption potential.”

“With increased exposure to investors, end users and partners, we are excited to see how far our innovators will go,” Dan said in a statement.

The DIANA initiative is highly selective. For the first cohort chosen last year, only 44 organizations made the cut out of more than 1,300 applicants after an evaluation of their proposals that focused on three key “challenge areas” — energy resilience, sensing and surveillance, and secure information sharing. Less than 25 percent of those firms have been tapped to move into phase two.

In December 2023, a senior alliance official told reporters that DIANA is “a really interesting example of how you can use an organization like NATO to reach out beyond the traditional defense sector.”

Companies chosen for each cohort work with mentors to develop their projects, the official noted during a Defense Writers Group meeting in Washington, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“The whole system is set up in a way that is very dynamic. And so it’s going to be learning from this first cohort of innovators and refining every year … The system is built in a way that we will adjust and upgrade and innovate with every single cohort,” they said.

In July, officials kicked off their search for the second DIANA cohort, which will join the accelerator in early 2025. According to NATO, the alliance received more than 2,600 submissions from vendors that were asked to focus on five challenge areas: energy and power; data and information security; sensing and surveillance; human health and performance; and critical infrastructure and logistics.

“We’re looking to select roughly about 15 companies per challenge area, which is about 75 and is proportionately the same as we did last year,” Tien Pham, DIANA’s chief scientist, told reporters in June.

Meanwhile, the alliance is moving to expand DIANA’s footprint. Earlier this year, it announced that the number of related tech accelerator sites across the multinational network will jump from 11 to 23, and the number of test centers will increase from 90 to 182. After the expansion — which is intended to enhance the alliance’s capacity to support companies and other participants as they develop their tech — there will be DIANA locations in 28 nations, officials said.

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The summit, which kicks off Tuesday, is expected to include discussions and potentially major announcements about the road ahead for digital capabilities

Gen. Chris Badia, NATO’s deputy supreme allied commander transformation, noted that the transatlantic partners need to plan for warfighting in five domains — air, land, sea, space and cyber. However, cyber capability is “not at the level it should be,” he said at the FP Security Forum on Monday.

“You have to have dominance in three major steps. First of all, you need … information dominance. If you have information dominance, then you get into the decision dominance. And once you have that, then you have engagement dominance overall. So really, the first question is: What do you need for new technology when you go into information dominance? And then … it comes into space and it comes into cyber,” he said. “It’s assured access to space and it’s data security. This is what we are after, this is [where] you have to invest. And this is where we need to come closer a lot more and cooperate much more. So those are the systems we’re looking for.”

One way that NATO is trying to bolster its capabilities is through the Defense Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (DIANA) initiative, which launched last year to help find and accelerate dual-use technologies that could address contemporary and emerging security challenges.

DIANA is currently accepting applications from startups and other organizations for its second cohort. One of the five “challenge areas” is data and information.

“One of the challenges last year and this year includes data security and interoperability because we want to get really sort of the bright engineers and scientists and entrepreneurs that can have ideas that they can put forward that have an impact, not only in defense and security but also the commercial area … These are areas that are just as important in the commercial realm for information security as it is for the military security. So the ideas that can come forward here, we need to not only be able to elicit it from the human capital across the NATO alliance but then to also be able to accelerate its development, accelerate the business itself so that we can get these solutions out into the market and out into use for NATO allies. So this is a very, very important area,” Barbara McQuiston, chair of the DIANA board of directors, said at the FP Security Forum.

Across the alliance, officials are looking for defensive cyber tools amid digital transformation, she noted.

“We’re more and more reliant on the data and on the capabilities that we need to have in the field and at the edge of where we operate. So this is something that is a large theme of all the activities, touches on NATO across the board, but being able to have the dual-use technology come in and very quickly play a role and very quickly be able to give you capabilities in the field, and also be able to accelerate these ideas as we need them to keep at the pace of change and adoption that’s needed for secure defense,” McQuiston said.

“In many ways, we’re looking at information security and interoperability across the alliance, and also looking at zero-trust systems and a lot of the security implications that defense and security think about when they’re putting things in the field and information in the field, with AI technologies, sort of making sure that we can have a robust system that’s defendable even with different and new attack surfaces,” she added.

Zero trust is a cybersecurity framework that assumes networks have already been penetrated by adversaries, and therefore organizations need tools to constantly monitor and authenticate users and their devices as they move through a network. The U.S. Defense Department is aiming to meet its own target levels for zero trust by the end of fiscal 2027.

Meanwhile, artificial intelligence-enabled cyberattack capabilities are a growing concern for NATO countries worried about defending their networks.

Tom Burt, corporate vice president for customer security and trust at Microsoft, said U.S. companies working on AI are keeping an eye on potential adversaries that might look to exploit these types of technologies.

Currently, nations such as Russia and China appear to be using AI more for their disinformation operations than network attacks, he suggested at Monday’s forum.

However, “in the longer run, we have to be very vigilant for what we’re seeing our adversaries do and be prepared to work with governments on how we respond to that, to minimize the risks,” Burt added.

In the future, AI technologies will likely provide more of an advantage to defenders than attackers when it comes to cyber, Burt said, noting the large amount of private sector investment going into artificial intelligence.

“I have this great confidence that in the intermediate term … that AI is going to provide cybersecurity defenders with an asymmetric advantage over our attackers. And there’s several reasons for that. The first reason is to do AI, you need the world’s best data scientists, and the private sector … we have that. The second thing is unbelievable financial resources. So Microsoft is committing more than $12 billion every quarter to building the data centers with the GPUs that we need around the world to both train and operate these AI models. And … our competitors are making similar investments,” he said. “It’s coming from companies that have great financial resources. When you think about that, and you think about the ability of the cybercrime syndicates or even most of the world’s governments, they can’t compete with the need to build those systems, which they require to be able to do the work that they’re going to want to do to counter the defenses we can build. So that gives us a significant advantage. And it takes the number of even governments that you have to be thoughtful about in this area down to a small number.”

A third factor is that large companies like Microsoft are already working with large data sets and receiving trillions of “signals” from end-user devices, cloud services and everything in between, Burt said.

“That is a unique data set that we can train defensive AI models against. And we’ve seen that be successful in Ukraine with our Defender for Endpoint, identifying Russian wiper malware and blocking it — not because we had a signature, not because we’d seen it before, because the algorithm said, ‘Wait, this code is up to no good.’ We’re going to be able to build more sophisticated algorithms that are going to look at that stream of data and see adversary activity before it impacts customers and block it. I’m confident that that’s going to be a capability. I know our teams are working on those capabilities now. And I’m confident that in that three-to-seven-year time frame, if we don’t create a significant asymmetric advantage, we won’t have done our job,” he said.

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NATO’s Defense Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (DIANA) initiative launched in 2023, and 44 startups from 19 countries were subsequently tapped to form its inaugural cohort. Those participants submitted ideas in three key “challenge areas” — energy resilience, sensing and surveillance, and secure information sharing — and recently completed a six-month accelerator bootcamp program led at five sites in Europe and North America. 

According to an announcement DIANA officials shared with DefenseScoop on Monday, those interested in applying for its second cohort are invited to submit proposals across five new challenge areas: “Energy and Power; Data and Information Security; Sensing and Surveillance — which build on the first three pilot challenges; as well as Human Health and Performance; and Critical Infrastructure and Logistics.” 

With the deadline set for Aug. 9, organizations have six weeks to prepare and apply.

“We’re looking to select roughly about 15 companies per challenge area, which is about 75 and is proportionately the same as we did last year. It’s very exciting,” NATO-DIANA’s Chief Scientist Dr. Tien Pham told reporters last week.

In several virtual sessions that made up the DIANA media day on June 24, Pham and other officials involved previewed plans for this second challenge set, and spotlighted how the program is working to pave the way for near-term adaptation of high-tech commercial technologies to meet NATO’s evolving needs.

“So, what do we do? We provide technology developers, innovators, startups and companies with the resources, networks of end users, accelerators, test centers — you name it — and expertise, across the defense and security challenges to create a more peaceful and resilient ecosystem, so that we can address some of the challenges that we may face within the alliance in the future,” Pham explained. 

Beyond an associated, expanding network of more than 200 accelerator sites and test centers in innovation clusters across the member states of the alliance, there’s also a regional office for DIANA in the United Kingdom and a regional hub in Estonia. 

Plans are also in the works to open another office in Canada later this year.

NATO received around 1,300 applications in response to the first cohort’s challenge set, Pham said, noting that it came out to about 450 in each of the three areas. 

Technologies developed by those 44 companies originally selected include but are not limited to innovative fuel cells, micro wind and hydro-turbines, secure optical communications and drone identification capabilities.

In response to questions from DefenseScoop on Monday, a senior NATO communications official confirmed that each of the startups received 100,000 euros in that first phase of DIANA that encompassed the six-month bootcamp that officially wrapped up last week. 

Those in the first cohort who are selected for the next six-month phase will get an additional 300,000 euros. That effort, which is focused on “scaling up,” is now kicking off separately but simultaneously with this new challenge to underpin the next cohort.

“The numbers will be the same for the second set of challenges [as it comes together] next year. Companies can also apply for additional funding for testing,” the senior official said.

Alliance officials stated in the press release calling for applications to the next cohort that each of the five submission areas this year is aimed at addressing “a critical and complex challenge facing the world, and invites emerging and disruptive technology developments as part of a portfolio of potential solutions.”

“Proposals will be assessed against criteria such as the potential transformational impact, novelty, technological feasibility and commercial viability,” they wrote. 

Notably, the alliance’s latest call for DIANA submissions comes a week before the 2024 NATO Summit that will be held in Washington.

Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh confirmed during a press briefing on Monday that Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and other Pentagon leadership are set to meet with their international counterparts at the summit, but she declined to share further details about their plans.

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The half-dozen firms are among a total pool of 44 that were tapped for the effort.

A 50-page unclassified but unpublished NATO document obtained by DefenseScoop last week, and an email interview on Wednesday with a senior alliance official, shed new light on what’s unfolding in the earliest stages of the Defense Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (DIANA), and who is involved.

“DIANA is looking to complement national efforts to scale deep-tech, dual-use innovation and promote smooth adoption pathways,” Adrian Dan, NATO’s chief commercial officer for DIANA, told DefenseScoop.

“We are working on a number of partnerships to help make this happen, including exploring conversations with like-minded investor communities, and building stronger linkages with private industry. Close collaboration with NATO’s 32 nations is key to bridging the gap between innovation, adoption and capital, and will help to build resilient and flexible ecosystems that support a peaceful global future,” he said.

Building on momentum since DIANA launched a little more than two years ago, NATO recently unveiled plans to expand the network’s reach in the near term and host innovation hubs in 28 of its member nations.

The first two DIANA “acceleration sites” in North America are operating in Boston and Seattle.

Broadly, officials leading the initiative issue “challenges” in specific high-priority problem areas for the alliance, and ask innovators to propose solutions in response. Those companies handpicked to engage then receive training, funding, commercial advice, and access to defense expertise and investors via DIANA’s still-growing network.

In its “pilot year,” the challenges cover three areas: energy resilience, undersea sensing and surveillance, and secure information sharing.

There were more than 1,300 applicants who sought to join this original accelerator program in 2023, and the 44 companies ultimately chosen out of that bucket are now participating in a six-month bootcamp.

“The current cohort has been taking part in the accelerator program delivered throughout our five global accelerator sites. [There are] three in Europe and two in the U.S. Each site will organise a ‘Demo Day’ for their respective companies to help expose their technologies to potential end users, and provide a platform for companies to show off their progress,” Dan explained in the email.

According to the NATO document shared with DefenseScoop last week by a U.S. defense official involved in DIANA, four American companies were picked for the undersea sensing and surveillance challenge set. 

The energy resilience and secure information-sharing challenge areas each have one U.S.-based participant — making a total of 6 American companies involved.

“The first cohort emerged from a highly competitive, two-stage process and included companies from across the full Alliance. The innovation ecosystem in the U.S. is strong, and we saw that reflected in the success of American companies across the three challenges in the pilot year, particularly in Sensing and Surveillance,” Dan told DefenseScoop.

The approved proposals in that area include a “robot modified for the seabed to locate and track natural and manmade moving objects,” a “renewable ocean wave energy platform that can easily be deployed anywhere offshore to host and provide power and communications to a wide array of undersea applications,” and more, the document states.

“We are looking forward to seeing high quality applications from American companies for the next round of challenges that we will launch in the summer of 2024,” Dan noted.

As the high-profile, multi-national acceleration effort continues to scale up and evolve, he and his team at NATO aim to eventually reach 10 challenge calls per year. As a result, they also expect an increase in the number of companies that will be tapped for the program. 

“Our first cohort expanded from the initial 30 to 44, reflecting the volume of high-quality applications that we received. For our second round of challenges, we anticipate five challenge areas, and we will select a minimum of ten companies per challenge topic. As we grow, we may select greater or fewer companies in each area depending on our budget and the quality of applications received,” Dan said.

“DIANA supports the building of interoperability and capacity throughout the 32 Allied Nations, and so we will be looking for a fair geographical balance where possible, while ensuring excellence and technological talent are always the top criteria,” he added.

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Geospatial intelligence, or GEOINT, broadly refers to imagery and data that’s gleaned from satellites, radar, drones and other means — and then analyzed by experts to visually depict and evaluate physical features and specific geographically referenced activities on Earth. 

“To preserve and further advance our technological edge is one of the key pillars of the NATO 2030 agenda. And in this effort, geospatial artificial intelligence — or GeoAI — is a key area which will revolutionize the way that we look at GEOINT in the future,” NATO’s Assistant Secretary General for Intelligence and Security Scott Bray said during his keynote at the annual GEOINT Symposium on Tuesday.

GeoAI methods combine artificial intelligence with geospatial data and analysis technology to boost understanding and solve complex, spatial problems.

“Spatial machine learning algorithms and deep learning techniques have become extremely powerful, fueled by unprecedented computing power. Leveraging these technologies on large collections of imagery, or geospatial data, will allow us to greatly improve the intelligence production cycle through applications like automatic change detection, and in areas of interest or socio-economic analysis, maritime safety, analysis of space and cyber events, and many others,” Bray said. 

He pointed to NATO’s Defense Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (DIANA) initiative as a key mechanism via which the allies involved can directly connect with commercial and academic partners around innovative capabilities and activities like GeoAI. 

Launched in 2022, DIANA is designed to expand multinational cooperation and foster an innovation network to more strategically deploy emerging and dual-use technologies. 

Building on momentum — and the expansion of NATO to include Sweden and Finland — since then, the alliance recently confirmed plans to host tech accelerator sites at DIANA locations in 28 nations.

Outside of that well-backed innovation initiative though, Bray said NATO members still have a lot to do to improve their ability to share data and work interoperably at speed and scale.

“With 32 allies, with lots of intelligence that comes in — ultimately, in a world in which we are faced with not just the Russia and Ukraine challenge, but with so many other issues — then ultimately, what we need is more capacity for rapid exploitation and sense-making of that intelligence,” he explained. “That is a place where, certainly, private industry is leading,” which means it’s a ripe area for NATO to pursue new and deepen existing partnerships, he added.

Bray — who has extensive intelligence community experience and previously served as the U.S. acting director of naval intelligence — emphasized that today’s security environment is different.

“We’re not [just] talking about great power competition right now in Europe — we’re talking about the fact that there is open conflict in Europe. And the degree of integration that it is going to take between all the allies, to include the United States, and with our private industry partners to ensure that our defense industrial capacity and our intelligence industrial capacity is well-integrated, is absolutely essential for peace and stability in our era,” Bray said.

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The DIANA initiative, which was launched in 2022, was set up to boost cooperation on emerging technologies and foster a far-reaching innovation network. It’s particularly focused on supporting startups and other players in the high-tech sector that are working on dual-use technologies.

The number of related tech accelerator sites across the multinational network will jump from 11 to 23, and the number of test centers will increase from 90 to 182, the alliance announced Thursday. New hubs are expected to come online in the coming months.

After the expansion — which is intended to enhance the alliance’s capacity to support companies and other participants as they develop their tech — there will be DIANA locations in 28 nations.

“They will focus on solving some of our biggest defense and security challenges and sharpening our technological edge in areas ranging from artificial intelligence and cyber to 5G, hypersonics, and autonomous systems,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters at the alliance’s headquarters in Brussels Thursday, according to a press release.

NATO picked the first DIANA cohort late last year, selecting 44 organizations out of more than 1,300 applicants after an evaluation of their proposals. They were tasked with addressing challenges related to undersea sensing and surveillance, secure information-sharing and energy resilience. Each firm was expected to receive 100,000 euros to help pay for expenses as they develop their solutions.

“I think it’s a really interesting example of how you can use an organization like NATO to reach out beyond the traditional defense sector,” a senior NATO official told reporters in December during a Defense Writers Group meeting in Washington, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“They will now be working with DIANA’s mentors to really develop their projects,” the official said. “That’s the first time around. And the whole system is set up in a way that is very dynamic. And so it’s going to be learning from this first cohort of innovators and refining every year … The system is built in a way that we will adjust and upgrade and innovate with every single cohort.”

Finland — which officially joined NATO last year after the country applied for membership following Russia’s 2022 large-scale invasion of Ukraine — will host an accelerator site and two test centers, the nation’s Ministry of Defence announced Thursday. Sweden — which also sought to join the alliance following the Russian invasion — officially became the newest member of NATO last week, opening up opportunities for Swedish companies to participate in DIANA.

VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland will set up an accelerator in Otaniemi in collaboration with Aalto University and the University of Helsinki, which will initially focus on next-generation communications as well as quantum tech. The new test centers — which will be located at the University of Oulu and the Otaniemi office of VTT — will be geared toward cyber-secure communications, quantum, space and 6G network technologies, according to a release.

“Digital communications systems play a vital role in modern warfare. Investing in different kinds of test environments and pursuing international research and development cooperation are central to verifying the military usability of new technologies. We have a high level of expertise and a tradition of long-term investment in communication network and quantum technologies. Finland’s active involvement in DIANA opens up new opportunities, reinforces the technological and industrial base of Finland’s defense and improves the security of the Alliance through national top expertise,” Finland’s Minister of Defense Antti Häkkänen said in a statement.

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DIANA was set up to boost cooperation on emerging technologies and foster a transatlantic innovation network.

Through the initiative, the alliance will play an active role in supporting startups and other players in the high-tech sector that are working on dual-use technologies, a senior NATO official told reporters Thursday during a Defense Writers Group meeting in Washington. The official spoke to the media on condition of anonymity.

“It is a way really to bring together academia, private sector, government and … military users of those technologies together on a transatlantic basis. So, think of a transatlantic DARPA with innovation centers all over the alliance,” the official said.

More than 15 centers have already been established, they noted.

“This year, DIANA went from setting up the centers where we bring together these different parts of society and recognizing that that’s critical to advancing innovations, to actually actively supporting a number of startups and early innovators in implementing their own projects,” the official said. “I think it’s a really interesting example of how you can use an organization like NATO to reach out beyond the traditional defense sector.”

The alliance kicked off the initial DIANA pilot challenge in June. The 44 companies tapped for the inaugural cohort — which are all headquartered in nations that are members of NATO — won out among more than 1,300 applicants after their proposed solutions were evaluated, according to a press release.

The first grants are expected to be issued this month. Each firm will receive 100,000 euros to help pay for expenses as they develop their technology solutions for one of the three challenge problems, according to the release.

“The first cohort was really just announced days ago. And so they will now be working with DIANA’s mentors to really develop their projects,” the senior NATO official told reporters. “That’s the first time around. And the whole system is set up in a way that is very dynamic. And so it’s going to be learning from this first cohort of innovators and refining every year … The system is built in a way that we will adjust and upgrade and innovate with every single cohort.”

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The agency is conducting market research to inform plans to enhance its support capabilities by implementing an “AI cognitive agent platform” within the alliance’s Enterprise Service Operations Centre (ESOC), according to a special notice posted on Sam.gov.

The far-reaching organization, which includes 3,000 civilians and military staff spread across 29 sites throughout Europe and North America, provides a wide array of support and services for the alliance related to IT, cybersecurity, command and control, business application and other mission areas, according to its website.

“The purpose of this project is for the NCI Agency to revolutionize its support operations by introducing an AI cognitive agent. This technology will automate routine tasks, streamline ticket management and empower [Level 1] personnel to address complex issues efficiently ensuring a high level of service delivery,” according to an annex listing requirements and other information about the initiative.

The organization is looking for commercially available AI tools to help with a wide range of tasks including process workflows, password management, ticket management and escalation, knowledge base integration, notification template creation, and reporting and analytics, among others.

The tech is expected to be able to interact with humans, learn, and improve over time.

“The AI software cognitive agent will interact via a user interface with people with fast and meaningful responses, to solve problems or propose solutions through interactive conversations, with understanding of natural language and context, applying logic, and inferring implications,” according to the notice. “The AI agent will learn from operating procedures, historical chat sessions, Frequently Asked Questions and will have the capability to integrate new process instructions and workflows.”

Another aim of the initiative is to familiarize staff with emerging AI tech. To that end, the new software tool is expected to use natural language processing techniques and word searches to find relevant articles in the “knowledge base,” and make suggestions to agency personnel.

The agency plans to implement the technology through a one-year pilot on-premise in Mons, Belgium. Penetration and integration testing and user testing will be conducted before the capability is deployed, according to the notice.

The deadline for industry to respond to the notice is Dec. 15.

Plans for the new cognitive agent come amid a broader push by NATO and its member nations to acquire new artificial intelligence capabilities, which officials in charge of leading NATO transformation efforts have identified as being “of highest importance.”

Two years ago, the alliance formally adopted a new AI strategy and later established a review board to help govern the development and use of the technology.

Last year, the alliance unveiled a new Strategic Concept that highlighted the need to focus on emerging and disruptive capabilities. It also launched the Defense Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (DIANA), which is intended to provide long-term investments in startups and other entities developing key technologies that the alliance is interested in, such as artificial intelligence, autonomy, big-data processing and others.

Earlier this year, MITRE began steering two new artificial intelligence-focused “exploratory teams” for NATO’s Information Systems and Technology Panel to inform its biannual AI strategy update.

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First unveiled in 2021 as a strategic new mechanism to sharpen the alliance’s innovative edge, DIANA is designed to accelerate transatlantic cooperation on emerging technologies and generate a network of national security-focused startups to enable NATO-relevant capabilities via grant programs.

“One thing which definitely is going to happen across the alliance is better situational awareness of where talent and innovation sits. That’s the first thing and that’s a very, very important data point. We’re also going to get good data points on where we feel we may need to develop some more capacity and get some capacity-building going on, as well,” DIANA’s first Managing Director Deeph Chana told DefenseScoop on Tuesday during a press briefing to announce the programs impending initial request for proposals. Information from the briefing was embargoed until Friday.

Through DIANA, NATO plans to support roughly 30 startups in this first funding year.

Entities selected will be awarded 100,000 euros each in the form of a non-dilutive grant, with the opportunity to get up to 300,000 euros at a second stage — if they are successful in the first six months of the program.

“It’s very important for me to point out to you that this funding does not take any [intellectual property] or equity from the startups,” Chana said.

Overall, those leading DIANA aim to have a multimillion-euro budget for this year, and an annual budget moving forward of around 50 million euros.

“We will also be looking to grow that through leverage and other different mechanisms. That’s going to be a job for me to kind of grapple with over the next few years,” Chana said.

Beyond that funding, the alliance is offering a dual-use accelerator program, with multiple sites being established in regions across the world.

“By ‘dual-use,’ we are very explicitly encouraging startups to have applications in the more traditional tactical military domain — as well as, shall we say, in a sort of civil space such that they have a diverse opportunity for revenue, which we think builds more resilient, more investable companies in this space. So, this is a key feature of DIANA and a key differentiator, we believe, from any other similar kind of program that exists probably anywhere in the world,” Chana noted.

The tapped startups will have exposure to 31 different markets, spread across all NATO member nations.

“And of course, North America is a massive part of this equation — and in this phase, we will have accelerator sites in Seattle and Boston, taking part in the pilot and a regional office locally in Canada,” Chana confirmed.

Separate, but associated with DIANA, the alliance has also established the new NATO Innovation Fund to enable deeper exposure to more venture capital for participating partners.

While DIANA is an “agency of NATO,” according to Chana, the Innovation Fund “is there to take equity and to take some of the best ideas that come out of DIANA, and then to give them further growth momentum.

This original DIANA pilot will focus on three specific technology priority areas for the alliance, the managing director confirmed.

For the first — energy and resilience — the team will be looking to help encourage and evolve technologies to provide persistent and resilient energy supply.

“We’ll be looking at everything from how you might actually create energy-generation components themselves, maybe looking at things like mesh networking and that sort of stuff from an energy perspective, right the way through to how we can create control systems and the backend of these energy systems so that they are cyber secure and again, give us a sense of resilience and security inside the infrastructure systems. I know many of you will know from recent events, particularly things like the war in Ukraine, how important this idea of sort of infrastructure resilience has become — and so this is a very, very timely and important topic,” Chana explained.

The second focus area is sensing and surveillance.

Chana said that that work is principally about producing the next generation of detectors and sensor systems to interrogate the parts of the world that are difficult to see, sense and investigate.

“In particular, what we’re going to be looking at as a focal area is going to be the underwater, undersea environment where the science and the physics are just very challenging, historically,” he said.

“Then the third area is going to be around secure information sharing. So, this is very, very explicitly about how communication systems transact information between points A and B in a manner that is secure — but is also again persistent and efficient,” he explained.

“And I think what we’re going to see in particular — in each one of the different challenge programs — is probably a revelation, I would say, on the types of data and information that are being transacted under each one of those themes today,” Chana told DefenseScoop during the press briefing.

The base requirement for a startup to be able to join the DIANA program is simply being incorporated inside a NATO nation.

“We are trying to create a wide funnel to effectively bring in as much talent and innovation as possible in the first instance,” Chana said.

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