New Horizons panel discusses operationalizing artificial intelligence Published March 21, 2025 By Capt. Adam Livermore 66th Air Base Group Public Affairs NEWTON, Mass. – U.S. Air Force, industry and academic leaders held a panel to discuss operationalizing artificial intelligence at the annual New Horizons event March 11. Panelists from the Cyber & Networks Directorate, Air Force Research Laboratory, University of Massachusetts Lowell and Raft discussed the future of AI and its various applications and capabilities. “The thing that gets me excited is seeing progress in closing the gap to making artificial intelligence real for warfighters,” said Mike Foster, chief data engineer of Raft. While Foster emphasized the progress being made, others highlighted the expanding capabilities of AI and the challenges that remain. “What I'm most excited about is the models we're training are able to do a lot of different things,” said Ann Rumshinsky, associate professor at Miner School of Computer and Information Science, University of Massachusetts Lowell. “There are a few things that we're still trying to figure out, such as reasoning and generative capabilities. That's probably going to be close to being solved in the next year or two.” Success stories highlighted AI’s role in contracting, natural language understanding and military applications. The need for high-quality, pretrained data was emphasized by using examples of AI improving efficiency in tasks like search and customer support. Alexis Bonnell, chief information officer and director of the Digital Capabilities Directorate of the Air Force Research Laboratory, discussed the increase in efficiency in relation to coding. “On average, we're seeing a 25% to 85% increase in productivity of our coders,” she said. “When you think about how hard it is to find, keep and retain coders, if you have a leader out there who’s not allowing your coders to use artificial intelligence, they will leave.” Bonnell contends this is an opportunity to change how people think about technology budgets. “Don't think about it as my normal tech budget, or my data budget, and then my artificial intelligence budget over here,” she said. “Instead, we really have to demand the fact that whatever we're using should be optimized with the best technology available.” New Horizons is sponsored by the Lexington-Concord chapter of AFCEA.