A key goal of UK defence is to strengthen its Artificial Intelligence (AI) ecosystem. To help ensure economic and industrial resilience, they aim to become an ‘AI ready organisation’ achieving ‘AI readiness’ by 2025. This will require rapid digital change. Technology and data would no longer be seen as enablers but central to an approach, which requires both data centricity and digital agility. This represents a major shift in thinking that will require the adoption of new technologies, infrastructures, and policies as well as different skillsets.

The AI ecosystem will need to align with the approach specified in the Defence Command Paper 2023 (DCP23), which sets out how the UK will meet the challenges of a more contested and volatile world. DCP23 states that Defence will need to be allied by design, integrated and innovative. The ecosystem should be fully integrated with allies and partners, industry, services, governments and across domains. Allied by design refers to a system where we can seamlessly work with our allies and partners. This could be to share intelligence or working together to build future capabilities. This requires an understanding of the different stakeholders’ needs and being able to seamlessly plug into their systems and architectures. Careful consideration is needed regarding interfaces and standards to ensure interoperability. An innovative approach would ensure modernisation leading to future capabilities that would deliver productivity and operational gains and ensure more resilient supply chains. Examples of data-driven capabilities include automation, analysis, and autonomy.

This special track will focus on addressing the challenges of establishing an Allied by Design AI ecosystem. We are also keen to understand any lessons that what could be learnt from other areas of the Public and Private sectors. Many of the challenges will require interdisciplinary solutions. We encourage conceptual papers and empirical papers that report on emerging research and lessons learned, covering topics that include, but are not limited to, the following:

• successful examples of use of standards and governance mechanisms for AI solutions that are deployed across international borders;
• how to establish trust in allied systems,
  addressing interoperability challenges across international borders;
• impact and management of inconsistent standards on data interoperability;
• ensuring interoperability with legacy systems
  examples of best practices;
• the changing role of individuals in a defence AI ecosystem;
• how digitisation impacts the public-service business model;
• what defence could learn from other domain and sectors (e.g., allied by design in space sector);
• dealing with classified data;
• role of industry and leveraging commercial technology and services;
• overcoming policy hurdles in an allied by design ecosystem