AI Investment in the Defence Industry
Artificial Intelligence (AI) presents a revolutionary opportunity to maximise productivity across sectors, but the application of the AI is complex. This study considers the application of this revolutionary technology to an area of the economy that has become to be seen as increasingly crucial in the UK, and wider world, that of the defence industry.
A key issue for the adoption of AI to enhance firm productivity is availability of a large volume of specific data to train the foundational models to be able to perform specific tasks. The need to ‘fine-tune train’ the AI models to incorporate knowledge about firm/sector specifics is inhibited by the often-proprietary data being at the firm-level, with firms unwilling to share beyond their organisation.
Restrictions on the sharing of data for details in relation to defence and security are far more numerous than those of data pertaining to other fields of the economy. Yet here are few industrial sectors where capacity of production and productivity are more central to societies at the current time than defence. Therefor our study is aimed at understanding, by speaking to the leading experts in the field, the parameters of data sharing restrictions and how productivity enhancements might be reached.
Objectives
Objectives
Speaking to those individuals who are working at the cutting edge of defence production and manufacturing, as well as AI development and data securitisation, will be fundamental to generating insights from this study. The significance of the defence industry in the regional economies of the UK is a key consideration motivating this project. Whether the UK’s defence industry will remain or increase in competitiveness, and how the adoption of AI will impact the workforce of the defence sector are key questions behind the more specific area being investigated.
The ultimate aim of this project is to help inform the investment decisions of firms and government to realise productivity gains from AI in a crucial sector area. The objectives that will be sought in order to achieve this aim will be to synthesize the insights of leading experts on this complex subject area to clarify and explore some key areas. Specifically, the project will be looking to clarify how much access to data, and possible limits in the sharing of this data across firms, is a barrier for AI adoption for firms in the defence industry. We will be also seeking to understand more about the state of the art and future prospects of fine-tune training of AI foundation models for downstream tasks in the defence industry production process. An exploration of the potential and desirability of firms and government working together on data-sharing collaboration initiatives might help to create space to facilitate productivity gains through AI adoption.
The Team
The Team
The project is based at the University of Birmingham’s City Region Economic Development Institute (City-REDI) and is led by Anne Green and Ian Taylor. Professor Green is currently Co-Director of City-REDI University of Birmingham. Ian Taylor, an academic and consultant with a decade of business experience in engineering, is based at Birmingham as a City-REDI Associate.
Anne’s substantial experience leading and successfully delivering research projects is complemented for this project by her experience as a former a member of the Lead Expert Group on the Government Office for Science Foresight Team’s study the ‘Future of manufacturing: a new era of opportunity and challenge for the UK’. Alongside Ian’s business management experience are several major relevant research publications from work conducted while working at the University of Oxford.