AFRL stood up an environment called the “LabVerse” around the time it created a new Digital Capabilities Directorate in March 2023.

“LabVerse is one of the ways, in essence, how we bring this information flow together more dynamically. So whether that is things from AI sandboxes, being able to let people play kind of that DevSecOps initial stage, all the way to being able to look at security as a service,” Alexis Bonnell, CIO and leader of the Digital Capabilities Directorate, told DefenseScoop Thursday at the GovCIO Media & Research AI Summit.

One “thing that I’m really excited about when we think about the types of experiments we’re doing in LabVerse is also things like looking at AI for system modernization. And I will tell you … the AI is actually very good at breaking down, for lack of a better term, itself. And so we’ve been able to take a lot of systems that might be in COBOL or Fortran, and you know, quite frankly, we don’t even have the talent in circulation anymore to be running these systems. So part of what we look at is not only how might the AI be able to help us go from those old system languages or programming languages to new, [but] what we didn’t expect is that the AI is also really good at showing us things like … this system has a lot of complex code, this system simple code,” Bonnell said. “We are seeing where partners built things in that maybe make it harder for other partners to follow, which I don’t think we expected to be able to see as easily as we can. And so there is a lot … in this learning by doing.”

She also highlighted the Air Force Research Lab’s experimental chatbot initiative, dubbed NIPRGPT because it’s intended to be used on the Non-classified Internet Protocol Router Network (NIPRNet). The platform, released about five months ago, allows airmen, guardians, civilian employees and contractors to interact with generative artificial intelligence. Officials are seeking feedback from users that could inform future investments and applications of those types of capabilities.

At Thursday’s summit, Amanda Bullock, the artificial intelligence lead at the Air Force Research Lab, told DefenseScoop that there’s been a lot of enthusiasm about NIPRGPT. The main use cases that service members have been employing it for, so far, are summarization of documents, drafting of documents and coding assistance.

However, Bonnell noted that officials are trying to serve as honest brokers for advising people about artificial intelligence capabilities.

“One of the most exciting things about AFRL is we serve a little bit as like a third-party agnostic consultant, if you will. And especially in the area of AI, we have so many people coming to us saying, ‘Is this thing good for AI?’ And sometimes the answer is ‘no,’” Bonnell said.

“We have, you know, a team that can actually add some AI into your system. But also with Amanda’s team, she’s looking at all of the commercial tools,” Bonnell noted. “And so LabVerse also includes the ability to understand, if you have this use case, you know, this small business already solved that right, or this large company already has an app for that. We call it wormholing the OODA Loop — meaning taking someone from, you know, an observation state to an end state.”

AFRL aims to be flexible with the LabVerse as warfighters’ needs evolve.

“One of the things we’re trying to do with LabVerse is to make sure that it is flexible to meet the demands we’re getting. So as an example, you know, one of the recent questions was: Can we do a decision, you know, analytics that kind of goes through a lot of the same education process … as many of our airmen or guardians, and then have kind of a battle buddy, right, informationally? So that is not a question that we got asked a year ago. And so I think what we’re trying to do is to make sure that LabVerse, instead of being a time capsule, that functions with humility to say we don’t even know what’s coming two weeks from now, six months from now — so how do we make it as adaptable a spinal cord, if you will, to be able to meet those new requests, those moments? And then, quite frankly, really making sure that we are humble enough and smart enough to know that, if that’s not our jam, or if someone else has already solved that, to actually be the first people to say, ‘Don’t reinvent that. Don’t do that. You know, find that over there,'” Bonnell said.

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“We’re refocusing on how we are achieving digital transformation. We’re taking a services-oriented methodology,” Pringle told reporters during a media roundtable at the annual AFA Warfare Symposium.

Formally approved and established on March 1, this new Digital Capabilities Directorate (DCD) is working to leverage best practices implemented by commercial companies to pave the way for more streamlined research processes and business operations, officials say.

The organization is fusing together formerly siloed elements of AFRL’s former Research Collaboration and Computing Directorate, as well as the lab’s former Business Process Reengineering Division and others. It also has roots that trace back to a temporary digital “war room” that was stood up to help drive innovation.

Much of the activities that were being conducted under those units will continue, Pringle confirmed. However, they’ll “be nested under this bigger capability that is more modern and aligned with how we operate in today’s world,” she said. 

AFRL officials involved in establishing the DCD are strategically working to help their colleagues “decouple” the data they rely on from the applications and tools they capture and model it in. 

“How do you think about that data as an asset of its own and manage it, so you can build that digital thread and know that you pick the same piece of data as the last person?” AFRL’s Chief Data Officer Andrea Mahaffey told reporters.

She noted that the lab is taking “very much an API-mindset approach,” referring to the term application programming interface — a software intermediary that essentially enables two different applications to communicate. 

“We don’t all need to be in the same tool, in the same platform or on the same network — we need the data to move across, and to get that data in the right hands of the right people,” Mahaffey said.

During the media briefing, AFRL’s Aerospace Systems Directorate Director Michael Gregg and Chief Enterprise Architect James Sumpter said the lab is utilizing a model-based approach and is being deliberate about balancing alignment, autonomy, automation, and agility in its in-the-works and existing architectures.

Officials said they are taking an iterative approach to innovation.

“We’ve got a big focus on architecting and building out the future of [information technology] for AFRL — and we call it the labverse. It’s an integrated digital infrastructure for science and technology,” Sumpter explained.

That virtual environment will host sensitive government workloads at impact level 5, officials also confirmed. 

Although the directorate and labverse associated with it are still nascent, AFRL officials hope to extend this experiment across the broader Air Force in the future. 

“We want to expand this as much as possible. So, that’s why we deliberately focused on managing our data first,” Gregg said. 

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