Day in the Life of an AI-Augmented Analyst

Hello, I’m Ylli Bajraktari, CEO of the Special Competitive Studies Project. In this edition of our newsletter, SCSP’s Tara McLaughlin and William Usher speculate on how a U.S. intelligence analyst might experience a typical day in an AI-augmented working environment.

SCSP’s Fall 2023 report, “Generative AI: The Future of Innovation Power,” emphasized the transformative impact of AI in redefining intelligence work through the integration of AI tools with human judgment. This report serves as a backdrop for understanding the tangible benefits and practical applications of AI in intelligence analysis, as seen through the eyes of an intelligence officer in the following newsletter. 

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Day in the Life of an AI-Augmented Analyst

Morning at Langley – 0800 hours

CIA headquarters is quiet when I arrive on Tuesday morning at 8 a.m. – save for the clacking of analysts on keyboards and footsteps down the hallway. Coffee in hand, I am ready for whatever the day might bring. As usual, I log into my AI-assisted workstation, which in typical government fashion has a complex name that is reduced to a pithy acronym. “ALICE” (Augmented LLM and Intelligence Cataloging Enterprise) buzzes to life and populates my desktop with the day’s most critical documents. My analytic “account” (the intelligence topic I work on) is fast-paced and busy. As a Terror Finance Analyst following Hizballah, I work to provide detailed, accurate intelligence reports to the policymakers I support. Each day, nearly 800 pieces of intelligence are waiting for my review – everything from NSA signals intelligence files to satellite imagery to leadership reports to long-term analysis from other agencies. ALICE filters through all of it.

Before ALICE, I would have had to sort through artifacts individually, one at a time, with no guidance on where to start. Now, ALICE prioritizes them into categories – green for low priority, yellow for medium, and red for high – to aid in sorting through the digital chaos that lay ahead. ALICE determines these priority rankings by analyzing my past production, by seeking my feedback on her recommendations, by looking at what other analysts and IC experts have been viewing, and by the keywords I use to tag important or interesting items – almost like a social media feed. Most of the artifacts are green, the usual mix of news articles and business reports related to my areas of focus on the Levant region and terrorism finance activities. A series of red documents includes important overnight cables from partners and allies and the latest intelligence from our human sources on the ground. Today, a group of yellow-tagged documents catches my eye. Yellow documents fall into an in-between category; not obviously critical reading, but potentially valuable or unusual.

When I select the cache of documents, they open into a dynamic computer visualization of a network centered around a French-Lebanese businessman living in Paris. The visual displays an array of financial records, travel documents, news reports, and other information that seems to be loosely connected. Unlike past models which were primarily text-based processors, ALICE is now a multimodal model that can receive and output a variety of data types providing more insight than ever before. When I select the businessman’s likeness, ALICE compiles a cursory summary on the gentleman based on open-source information available by a web search. Then, as I read through the summary, ALICE signals footnotes that link to supporting artifacts from across the CIA, the Intelligence Community, and the IC’s vast network of private sector partner companies that produce large volumes of analysis using openly-available and commercially-available information. The trove of documents all arrive in English (ALICE instantly translates the materials written in foreign languages) and each comes with a summary so I can better determine their purpose before reading the documents themselves. All these features make it easier and faster for me to scan for what is important, analyze it, and create my finished intelligence reporting.

The businessman appears to run an import-export business, and the reporting shows that he had recently traveled to Morocco and purchased a large compound on the Mediterranean. This purchase is what has set off the system’s alarm bells and caused it to be given a yellow label. On its own, a businessman buying a beachside vacation property is not unusual, but in this case, ALICE noticed an unusual pattern that would have been difficult for a human analyst to spot quickly. His business dealings were all over the place – everything from aviation parts to textiles to mineral fuels and organic chemicals, and now, a newly minted compound. I decide to dig deeper.

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The Mysterious French-Lebanese Businessman — 1000 hours

I know I need to reach out to my contacts at a key European foreign partner service to see if they have any information that could help me trace the businessman’s connections. In my early days at the Agency, I would have had to go through the Directorate of Operations to set up informational meetings with any non-CIA employees. The need for speed has eclipsed these old necessities. Now, I can instantly chat with counterparts via secure online messaging and desktop teleconferencing apps that are connected to ALICE.

I quickly reach out to my foreign contacts to see if they can provide additional information about European financiers. After a back and forth, they provide new information to crosscheck with the Agency’s existing holdings. I select the series of marked-yellow documents from this morning and tasked ALICE to identify any potential linkages.

The system leaps into action, tagging areas of connections between the new account numbers and the businessman. With the information, ALICE automatically provides a reordered set of documents for human review and asks whether I want to re-run our previous predictive analytic scenarios on Hizballah financial flows (I do). The fresh review of the financial records reveals a nearby property has been purchased recently by a man linked to a suspicious European bank account noted in the newly provided documents. I prompt ALICE via text (many of my colleagues now prefer to interact with her via voice) to analyze the transaction data and flag any patterns. It quickly spots cash flows, adding up to hundreds of thousands of dollars in small amounts, that have been transferred to several accounts throughout southern Europe, into Morocco and Algeria, and then across to Lebanon. The small amounts have been transferred dozens of times across several accounts in a very short period of time – almost certainly an indication that Hizballah’s financiers are using an AI of their own to hide their tracks. This is the duality of intelligence in the AI Age – it offered many benefits to analysts, but new challenges too.

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Connecting the Dots - 1200 hours

While we had suspected for some time there might be a capable financier operating in Europe and knew of accounts and a courier network in Algeria, the Morocco connection is an unexpected twist. This new information suggests that the network connecting terrorists and their financiers is growing and spreading westward. I do not need anyone to tell me that the development needs to be flagged for policymakers in US, allied nations and financial market regulators in the form of a written assessment, but I’m not sure how interested senior US decision-makers are in an assessment of the new network’s likely purpose. To get the answer, I asked ALICE to tap into the IC’s digital briefing and customer feedback tool (in place for about five years). The classified tool works in two ways. It allows our customers to prompt their intelligence questions and requirements and it unobtrusively monitors customers’ online interactions with IC products to ascertain their level of interest in a given topic. That analysis shows the customers are worried about troubling activity by Hizballah outside of the Levant, but remain uncertain of the group’s exact plans. I decide to see whether the revelations about the businessman and his growing network shed light on what those plans might be.

I ask ALICE to begin preparing an Alternative Competing Hypotheses matrix (a standard advanced analytic technique) and organize the evidence laid out in front of me. She quickly sorts the data and arrays the hundreds of relevant reports in neat rows and columns. I annotate the matrix with short ideas, questions, and links to other reports. ALICE monitors my workflow and, as I input, flags past documents related to Hizballah finance and populates rows with additional connections, assisting me in weaving previous analytical threads into my current project. When I finish the matrix, I invite ALICE to review and critique my work, marking weak pieces of evidence that are either fragmentary or derived from known, or suspected, fabricators. As always, she routinely filters out any open-source documents that contain spurious data or were generated using machines.

Together, the documents and my analysis show that the businessman is responsible for transferring hundreds of thousands of dollars over multiple months to Hizballah and that the group was using these funds to build up an attack capability in Western Europe. His tradecraft has allowed him to operate undetected and slip through human-centered illicit finance screens, but with a system like ALICE in place, we can sift through collected data holistically rather than in siloed research teams.

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Delivering Insight - 1400 hours

Finally, I need to do something with the new insight I have just uncovered. My first task is to prepare a written assessment for customers who will craft policy or take action against this growing illicit finance network. In addition to providing situational awareness to US policymakers regarding the shift in our analysis of Hizballah financing, I aim to equip my contacts at the European service with the information necessary for apprehension, thereby disrupting the financial network. ALICE could help me tackle the challenge with the speed and accuracy required. I open ALICE’s generative AI function and prompt the system with instructions to take the matrix we have collaborated on and take the first stab at converting it into a standard CIA World Intelligence Review (WIRe) article of about two-pages. Her work is serviceable, but as usual the obsessive adherence to the CIA Style Guide makes her prose stilted and hard to slog through. She has also relied on a couple of reports from sources that my experience has taught me are unreliable, or out of favor with key customers. I edit the draft for clarity, and make it likely to pass muster with my branch chief. I then have ALICE do a shorter version for the President’s Daily Brief (PDB), which is published a day or two after the WIRe. We use the PDB to ensure the President, our primary customer, is apprised of key developments, but its limited bandwidth means that some assessments have to wait. We only rarely leave vital insights to lower-ranking officials. Finally, I have ALICE note any areas where my thesis might need to be changed or updated.

Once I have the WIRe and PDB drafts in hand, I have ALICE run a standard check to see how well my assessments meet IC analytic tradecraft standards for accuracy, transparency, and clarity. She automatically tags the assessments with the necessary keywords for smooth digital archiving and scores them according to the National Intelligence Priorities Framework topics they address. I can now send the report off to my teammates and chief for review.

My focus shifts to preparing the Agency’s response to our European colleagues who’d supplied the vital information. I can’t flip them a copy of the WIRe or PDB; it contains a few references to especially-sensitive intelligence. But I do want to give them something meaningful to thank them for their contributions and encourage future close relations. The value of intelligence relationships to the US has been driven home repeatedly during my training, and the IC has enhanced ALICE’s capabilities to make it easier for analysts to maintain a dialogue with allied counterparts without inadvertently divulging material that has not been cleared. Because all IC data is tagged by classification level and marked with countries it can be shared with, it is easy for ALICE to prepare a releasable version that contains a similar bottom line and structure, but with sources appropriate to share. 

As I send my draft assessments, along with the other version, to my branch chief for review, I reflect on how much I am now able to accomplish in just one day. By teaming with ALICE, I can quickly sift through, absorb, and analyze hundreds of new reports, and discover a pattern hidden to unaided analysts. ALICE also aided me in acting on new information and delivering valuable new insights to our customers in a near-instantaneous fashion. I have heard stories from my more seasoned colleagues about how they used to spend most of their time on the final steps of the analytic process, polishing and re-polishing the prose in what sounded like endless rounds of management review. Now, nearly half my day is spent “rolling around in the data,” making connections, and thinking about matters to my customers. At today’s CIA, the analyst drives the analytic process, with ALICE’s help.

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Early the next morning, I dial my foreign colleagues to share the finalized reports, less than 24 hours after they have shared the additional information that connected the dots on the financing network. ALICE's swift analytical support provides an unprecedented pace to the intelligence cycle, leaving partners and allies impressed and grateful for our collaborative contributions to shared national security interests. After addressing a few questions from my counterparts, I turn to my next project, incorporating my newfound insights into my team’s collection and planning strategy against Hezbollah’s expanding finance network in Morocco, something we had not anticipated just a day prior. With ALICE's assistance, we generate several promising targeting leads that might expand our ability to monitor the network, which we provide to the collection experts in the CIA Directorate of Operations and the National Security Agency. We then use ALICE to prepare sanitized research questions to put to the IC’s network of open-source analytic vendors to amplify our coverage.

As I leave the office and turn south on the GW Parkway, I tune into my favorite DC area radio station. The familiar newscaster cuts through the mundane traffic reporting with a breaking story. The French have made a sudden arrest of a successful businessman in Paris suspected of providing financial support for an unnamed criminal organization. I smile to myself and pick up a little speed. I cannot wait to get back in the office the next day.

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