MissionOpsAI - Total Data Sovereignty Solutions for Defence
In this episode, we talk to James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing 'Mission Command' governance and data sovereignty to defence.
We discuss how the lack of transparency and control in current AI models is affecting high-stakes industries, how their work enables organisations to orchestrate multi-model AI workflows on their own infrastructure, maintain total data sovereignty, and ensure every autonomous decision is backed by an immutable audit trail.
Find out more: https://www.missionopsai.com
Production, Design & Artwork: Hiatus ↗ The Defence Design & Communications Agency
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00:00:01 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Hi, welcome to the Future Frontiers podcast from millilux.io.
00:00:05 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
In this episode, we talk to James Milnes, founder of Mission Ops AI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing mission command, governance and data sovereignty to defence.
00:00:14 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
We discuss how the lack of transparency and control in current AI models is affecting high-sex industries, how their work enables organisations to orchestrate multi-model AI workflows on their own infrastructure, and ensure every autonomous decision is backed up by an immutable audit trail.
00:00:37 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Hey James, thanks so much for joining us on the Future Frontiers podcast.
00:00:40 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
How are you doing in sunny Suffolk right now?
00:00:43 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
Well Chris, great to see you and it's a delight to be here and delightfully for a change, it's actually sunny here in sunny Suffolk.
00:00:50 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So enjoying life in the eastern counties of the UK.
00:00:56 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Oh, brilliant.
00:00:57 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
It feels like spring has kind of arrived early this year.
00:01:00 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
It's just been strangely warm the last few months now and I'm like I can already see like it's sunny here in London so I'm just thinking like this it's going to be it's going to be outdoors weather like shorts and t-shirt weather soon.
00:01:11 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
Yeah well I hope so and I have seen the old Beast from the East articles threatening us over the next week or so but anyway let's forget that one and get out in the shorts and get out in the sun as soon as possible.
00:01:24 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
For sure, for sure.
00:01:25 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Well, again, thank you so much for joining us on the Future Frontiers podcast.
00:01:28 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I really like to get experts in a lot of different fields here to kind of share their insights and obviously with their perspectives on what's going on.
00:01:36 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So to kick us off, can you just tell us a little bit about your background, particularly like your experience across UK, defence, like NATO, and essentially what led you to found Mission Ops AI?
00:01:49 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
I mean, Chris, it's a long old story, but going back 30 years.
00:01:55 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So having got a six-form scholarship way back in the 90s, I joined the Royal Air Force and commissioned through Cranwell.
00:02:03 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And then did my time focused on various military operations, but ended up specialising in specialist chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear warfare.
00:02:14 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And then ended up as the nascent Chief of Staff for the UK's Defence CBRN wing,
00:02:19 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
and the deputy component commander of the NATO CBRN task force for NRF 13.
00:02:26 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So I've been lucky enough over that whole career to have operated tactical, operational and strategic in some of the most challenging environments that are out there.
00:02:36 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And you know, it's been a great career.
00:02:40 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And I guess from that sort of perspective, it didn't just give me that sort of technical expertise and having, you know, the knowledge and the experience to be able to try and
00:02:49 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
translate scientific excellence into operational reality.
00:02:52 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
But what it also did was gave me a very particular way about thinking about decision making under uncertainty at speed and with imperfect information.
00:03:06 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And ultimately, you know, that comes down to what mission command is all about.
00:03:10 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
You know, the doctrine that gives you that ability to work with clear intent within defined constraints.
00:03:17 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
and then trust, hopefully, competent people to find the best way to achieve the objective.
00:03:23 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And that is something that crosses the Royal Marines, the British Army, and any, I would say, any good organisation that understands how to lead and manage their people properly, that sort of mission command doctrine really enables the ability for organisations to thrive and flourish.
00:03:44 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And I think that what that gives you is the ability to maintain command without being in every loop.
00:03:50 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And without being in every loop is really important, certainly with the AI stuff that we've been looking at, because there's a lot of talk about human in the loop.
00:03:57 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
You know, my belief is that we need to be human on the loop, because that enables faster decision making and the ability to run those organizations at pace.
00:04:09 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
Yeah.
00:04:09 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
I think when I started looking seriously at AI, and I mean, operationally, not just the excitement of being able to turn my picture into a cartoon and do some things on ChatGPT or ask Grok to do something ridiculous.
00:04:26 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
I kept seeing the same problem, that organisations are essentially bolting AI tools onto existing processes with no real governance,
00:04:37 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
No audit trails, no clear command structure, and especially there's, even now, what's going in the black box?
00:04:44 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
Who actually is accountable when the AI gets it wrong?
00:04:48 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And from a military perspective, that's not a technology problem, that's a command and control problem.
00:04:55 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And, a mission ops AI exists.
00:04:59 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
because I believed that problem needed solving before any AI could take ground and operate and function in genuinely critical environments, be that defence, NHS, financial, you know, the list goes on.
00:05:15 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So essentially 30 years of having a fantastic time doing some amazing stuff and actually now being able to hopefully be part of something that's going to be a generational shift and change in how we
00:05:27 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
not only to deliver a military operational effect, but also how actually we operate across our whole livelihoods and ecosystem of being human, moving forward, whatever that might be.
00:05:40 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, 100%.
00:05:40 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I mean, you brought up some really interesting points there.
00:05:42 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I mean, I like this term, like human on the loop.
00:05:45 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
That's definitely something we can loop back into.
00:05:47 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I'm sure that'll come back up in
00:05:49 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
kind of those future questions as well.
00:05:51 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
But I like you, I've had like this really deep interest in these high-risk sectors using AI.
00:06:00 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Hence, when I reached out to get you on the podcast, it seemed like a no-brainer.
00:06:04 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
You know, I was like, I can't think of anyone else who's so uniquely tied to AI and defence that would be able to kind of like
00:06:11 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
map this out for us who, I'll call myself a lay person here, many of the lay people listening as well, but can actually kind of make it understandable for us because the thing with a lot of the technical aspects of defence is that they're probably not as well known to people as they understand bombs, bullets and beans, you know, that we've been raised for over the last many decades, if not hundreds of years.
00:06:37 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
It does get me on to my next question.
00:06:39 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
It's something you mentioned before.
00:06:41 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So Mission Ops AI is built around the concept of like sovereign AI orchestration with mission command governance, which I appreciate is a bit of a mouthful, but kind of what does that actually mean for organisations operating in these critical environments?
00:06:58 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Real quick, if you want to hear when new episodes and articles are released,
00:07:02 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Be sure to sign up to our newsletter at the Mililux website or find a link in the show notes below.
00:07:06 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
But now, back to the episode.
00:07:11 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So, I mean, there are two parts there, and both parts are critically important to understand.
00:07:18 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And I guess, you know, this is a great part of why we're having this conversation.
00:07:23 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So let me unpack both parts there.
00:07:26 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So sovereign AI orchestration, that means that an organisation, whether that's government department, defence contractor, an NHS trust, they retain control over their full or their entire AI infrastructure, not just where the data is stored, but which AI models process it, on what hardware, and critically under whose jurisdiction.
00:07:52 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And that's a crucial distinction that is starting to become more and more critical in terms of some of the vulnerabilities that we're starting to see.
00:08:00 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
A lot of organisations think that sovereignty means ticking the GDPR box and using a UK data center.
00:08:08 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
This is not the case.
00:08:10 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
If the AI models themselves are owned and operated by a US entity, subject to American law, then regardless of where that data sits physically,
00:08:20 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
that organisation's sovereign control is compromised.
00:08:25 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
You know, we build, and that's why we build what we build.
00:08:28 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
The entire stack, the models, the compute, the data, the audit, all sits within the client's control envelope, which is what sovereign means.
00:08:37 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
It means that the client is effectively, it's not having a bank account, because a bank account, you can take up money, but the bank still controls how you spend that money.
00:08:47 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
We are giving you the bank, and the bank, you control it, and therefore that is sovereign control of that data and information.
00:08:55 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And then going on to the mission command side of things, that's all about that sort of, that decision-making layer that you and I have worked into, we work with, but actually if you then apply that to AI systems that operate within defined intent, that it understands what it's trying to achieve,
00:09:17 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
It's got defined constraints, as in what it absolutely cannot do, and then let it operate within those boundaries.
00:09:25 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
It has autonomy.
00:09:27 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
But what we make sure is that every action is then logged, every decision is traceable, and the human commander remains, as I said earlier, on the loop, but not buried inside it, which means that actually you can operate at speed.
00:09:39 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
Your OODA loop is spinning fast.
00:09:43 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And for those non-military guys,
00:09:44 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
That's you observe, orientate, decide, and act.
00:09:48 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And if you can get your OODA loops spinning faster than your enemy or your business commercial challenges, then actually you are working at a far faster and more efficient rate, and therefore more likely to win.
00:10:00 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So for any organisation operating in those critical environments, defence, emergency services, finance, this is what I believe that critical combination gives you.
00:10:11 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
which really is an AI superpower that is actually deployable rather than theoretically useful.
00:10:18 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, and I think you raised a really important point there is that people will think they've got sovereignty when actually part of the stack isn't necessarily within their control.
00:10:27 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So necessarily like an agent or a data center or something like that.
00:10:34 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
One of my biggest
00:10:36 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
My biggest bugs actually was the term, the use of the term the cloud, when people would say, oh, it's fine, it's things are in the cloud, it's safe.
00:10:43 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And what we used to do in kind of previous organisations, that would say, let's replace the word the cloud with somebody else's server.
00:10:51 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
It's safe because it's on somebody else's server.
00:10:53 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So when people start repeating that back to themselves, like, wait a minute, that's not very safe and like funny odd thing.
00:10:59 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, that's what we've been trying to.
00:11:03 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And Chris, absolutely, and therein lies the exact point.
00:11:07 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
it is on somebody else's server.
00:11:10 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And therefore, and who controls that server, what jurisdiction is it under, the list goes on.
00:11:16 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And the US Cloud Act of 2018, really, that's really the critical piece of legislation from the US that makes us all have to worry about what information is on what server and where.
00:11:34 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And I think given them developments across the Middle East and obviously geopolitics, at the moment it's kind of obvious to see why you would want to at least know where your data is served, under what jurisdiction, just in case, you know, heaven forbid, you lose control of one of those parts of the stack for, you know, for whatever reason, isn't it?
00:11:56 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
We were talking about it before the podcast, so that there's
00:12:00 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Probably a lot more vulnerability than people realise just in building these quite innocuous things.
00:12:07 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
Well, I mean, I think the case in point, which is pretty much live today, is the Anthropic case, where a major US capability provider is considered now a risk to national security because they didn't initially allow the government to do what they wanted to do with the capability.
00:12:25 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
Well, you know, and if that can happen there, you know, imagine if we
00:12:30 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
didn't support an operation somewhere, for example.
00:12:33 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And the administration decided that we were then a risk to national security as a country, and suddenly all our services are turned off.
00:12:41 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
Or worse than that, all the data that we've got actually gets hoovered into a massive data lake somewhere outside of our control.
00:12:48 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And we then are at huge risk of being effectively a data pawn in a global data crisis.
00:12:56 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And I don't think that we can afford to do that at any level, whether that defense, corporate, health care, et cetera, et cetera.
00:13:05 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So a really interesting challenge, which we sort of tried to set out to sort of meet head on, basically.
00:13:10 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, brilliant stuff.
00:13:12 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I mean, so my next question is kind of around more the individual AI tools.
00:13:19 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
A lot of organizations experimented with them at this kind of stage.
00:13:24 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
What do you see the opportunity for building a platform rather than a standalone model, as in that we're talking about that full stack rather than the individual new platform?
00:13:33 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Because obviously there's a lot of organisations spinning up off the back of a single platform.
00:13:39 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
How do you see that as a good or bad thing?
00:13:43 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So I think the real problem, well, certainly is now, it's not which AI is best, because they're all pretty good at what they do.
00:13:53 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
The real problem is how do you run AI reliably at scale with accountability across an organisation with multiple use cases, multiple risk levels, multiple regulatory requirements simultaneously.
00:14:10 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
Therein lies the problem because at the moment we've got a completely fragmented architecture across multiple ecosystems within a single business that is putting information, data and capability at risk.
00:14:24 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So I think from a military, if you take a military, a standalone AI tools like issuing every soldier a different radio with no common net, no call signs, no communications plan.
00:14:37 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
But so individually it might work, but collectively you have chaos.
00:14:40 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And one could argue that sometimes maybe it might have felt like that operationally.
00:14:43 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
But the reality is that if you think of it as a radio net where everyone's on the same channel doing the same thing, you have got coherence and a quality of communications.
00:14:54 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So really, I mean, what organisations need is orchestration.
00:14:57 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
That is the simple answer to what they need.
00:15:02 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
They need that layer that decides which AI capability is right for which task and that can route the information appropriately.
00:15:12 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So, you know, where does that information go?
00:15:15 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
What AI systems does it go through?
00:15:17 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And those decisions are made within the system so that it stops the human having to make those decisions and actually trying to achieve a policy paper that they may have read and forgotten about.
00:15:28 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
I think it also needs to maintain those audit trails.
00:15:31 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
It's got to enforce those governance rules without a shadow of a doubt.
00:15:35 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And it's got to integrate with the existing tech stack and that's a real,
00:15:39 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
That's a real challenge.
00:15:40 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
How do you make sure that you can seamlessly slide into what's already going on without a step change?
00:15:47 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
It is the relief in place model from a military perspective.
00:15:50 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
How do you roll into an operational picture and remove a unit, replace it with another unit, and the enemy doesn't really know that anything's changed.
00:16:01 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And that ultimately is what we're trying to achieve.
00:16:04 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And that is a platform problem, not a model problem.
00:16:07 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So the models become components of that.
00:16:09 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And then the platform becomes that command structure that makes them operationally usable within whichever environment or context that they're trying to trying to operate in.
00:16:19 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, fascinating.
00:16:20 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, that kind of I completely understand that kind of surgical requirement to get, you know, like you said, that relief in place without kind of anyone noticing the step change in difference or the whole stack coming crumbling down, you know, would be absolutely, you know, you just think of what's happening in the Middle East right now and just
00:16:39 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
or what's happened in the UK in resilience, for Heathrow Airport, for example, a few months back when one part of the stack comes falling down, it has huge knock-on effects and a huge cost per day when that happens, isn't it?
00:16:53 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So it's I think people kind of understanding just how sensitive these systems are when you try and take one out and put one in is not going to happen.
00:17:02 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
overnight, and requires a lot of cognitive horsepower, doesn't it, to understand the, 2nd and 3rd order effects down the line.
00:17:12 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And those bits are the bits that you've got to try and resolve before you can even start extracting other systems and getting them working together, which I think is why we went for the platform option rather than just stand-alone plug-ins, because you've got to be able to have that orchestration capability to
00:17:31 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
to bring on, bring online, take offline at the same time, whilst enabling people to continue operating.
00:17:37 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And that's the challenge and one that, I think we should all meet head on.
00:17:42 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, 100%.
00:17:42 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah.
00:17:43 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Well, let's pivot now a bit more on to, obviously, on to Mission Ops AI, because I realise you've got this really quite interesting technology here, so I don't want to shine a light on this and find out more about this.
00:17:57 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Essentially, one of the core pillars of your platform is the mission command governance engine.
00:18:04 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Can you just kind of expand on that a little bit?
00:18:06 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Why is governance auditability, traceability important when you're deploying AI in an operational mission critical environment?
00:18:15 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I mean, it kind of seems obvious to say in hindsight now, but kind of hearing it, hearing it from myself in a much more coherent manner, I think probably would be helpful for people.
00:18:28 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So I looked at this from a military context and treated AI as a military operation in many ways.
00:18:34 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And actually, that's how we sort of came to where we've got to with MissionOps AI.
00:18:41 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And all of everything you've mentioned there, the governance auditability and traceability, it's absolutely non-negotiable.
00:18:48 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
You know, everyone understands it instinctively within the military.
00:18:52 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
You've got to be able to do that.
00:18:53 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
You've got to be able to stand and explain why you've made a decision.
00:18:57 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And that's the leadership piece that goes there, that is ingrained within all of us.
00:19:03 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So, you know, that whole piece about every decision has a log, every order has a record.
00:19:10 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And this isn't about bureaucracy.
00:19:12 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
This is about making sure that when something goes wrong,
00:19:15 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And obviously it will, whether it's AI, whether it's just normal world, we've got to be able to reconstruct pretty much exactly what's happened in a similar way to a black box with an aircraft incident.
00:19:27 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
We've got to understand who authorised it, what they authorised, why they authorized it.
00:19:32 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And importantly, that's how you learn, and that's how you improve, and that's how you maintain accountability, which means that we are improving all the time.
00:19:41 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And with AI, we can massively improve at pace if we are
00:19:45 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
enabling that system to work like that.
00:19:48 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
I think the problem with AI though is that it removes it by default.
00:19:51 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
You tie something into a chat bot and it goes, yeah, this is it.
00:19:55 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
We're going to go and do this.
00:19:56 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And I think we've seen it many times where people have said, oh, vulnerable children have been left at risk or vulnerable people have been left in a difficult system.
00:20:07 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And I think that most commercial AI systems are those black boxes and input goes in.
00:20:15 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
and an output comes out.
00:20:16 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And then there's no record of the reasoning, no audit trail for the decision, and no clear line of accountability if the output causes harm.
00:20:26 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And that is a challenge.
00:20:30 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
Certainly in regulated sectors, defence, healthcare, financial, that's not operationally dangerous.
00:20:36 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
It's legally and ethically untenable.
00:20:40 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So
00:20:42 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
Things like the EU AI Act, when that comes into full force in the middle of this year, that is going to be starting to mandate exactly these things for high-risk AI applications.
00:20:54 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And we've built that governance in as the operating system, not as an afterthought.
00:20:59 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So every agent action, every model call, every decision in the platform that the platform takes is logged with timestamps, rationale, confidence levels,
00:21:10 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And importantly, the identity of any human who approved it.
00:21:15 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
Because you've still got to-- I still feel that I, me, we have got to take that responsibility.
00:21:22 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And it's not, oh, the AI did it.
00:21:24 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And that audit trail isn't an overhead within the business.
00:21:29 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
It's a thing that makes AI trustworthy and makes it actually trustworthy enough to actually use it at scale, commercially, in defense, and everywhere else.
00:21:39 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, I agree.
00:21:40 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I mean, I love that.
00:21:41 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I love that black box metaphor as well.
00:21:43 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I mean, I read the Matthew Sides book, I think, not like 8, nine years ago, you know, when it came out and it kind of got me thinking a lot about, you know, he uses the black box metaphor because it's there to improve the system and the process for the future, not necessarily just as accountability, which is, you know, as important as well.
00:22:05 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
it's the ability to go back and say, right, why did this thing happen?
00:22:09 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
How do we solve it from happening in the future?
00:22:10 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
How do we make this even more trustworthy and operationally efficient as possible?
00:22:18 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I'm kind of just started a master's in human factors at the moment and we've gone, you know, got into stuff like this.
00:22:27 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
and it's so obvious to see why it's useful for things in the future, because ultimately it's kind of saving organisations time, which is money, which is stuff that can go into R&D, which is more efficient ways of working.
00:22:42 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So it's all being underpinned by that, you know, accountability and that trustworthiness, isn't it?
00:22:48 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Because when you've got human AI teaming going on, people will naturally go, well, this isn't my
00:22:57 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I'm making this decision, it's not my responsibility, whereas actually it's like you have to, you must have to be able to stand up and say, I made this decision because of this reasoning, this reasoning, this, you know, using my system two brain, for example, instead of my system one impulsive brain, you know, at the time, you know, which is mentally, it's tiring, but ultimately, you know, it's got people's lives, livelihoods, and real-world impact on the other end of it.
00:23:22 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So, yeah, so you've got to
00:23:24 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
You've got to stand there and, if it means standing there in the dock and say, defending your decision, then it's like, it's what's got to be done when you've got the command of lethal force at your disposal.
00:23:37 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Just to jump in for a moment, if you're based in London, we'll soon be running a series of informal free events to bring the community together, which we're calling the defence sessions.
00:23:45 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Expect founder stories, investor insights, government agencies adding their thoughts to the relaxed settings of our central London presentation room.
00:23:52 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Dates to follow later this year.
00:23:55 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
Yeah, and Chris, you talk about lethal force, but it's also financial decisions.
00:24:02 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
Almost every decision within that chain, and I've seen it in the military, I've seen it in local government, where people make decisions behind the scenes and they're the ones pulling the strings, but they're not held accountable for those decisions.
00:24:15 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And what you end up with is a situation where
00:24:18 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
where the front line takes the blame for decisions that are made well, almost in that black box.
00:24:25 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And part of what we were trying to do here was not out those people, but enable the system that if you are operating in that environment, in those environments, is that it's not a problem.
00:24:38 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
Take responsibility for your decisions.
00:24:40 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
Stand by the money that you get paid to make those decisions.
00:24:43 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And if you get it wrong, which we're human, we do, and AI isn't necessarily going to make us all perfect.
00:24:49 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
It just helps us synthesise information and potentially come up with a less worse decision than the bad decision we're going to make.
00:24:55 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
But it's still nonetheless a decision that we've got to make.
00:24:59 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And from a military context, we usually say that you can only make a decision with the information you've got at that second in time.
00:25:05 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
You can't make it retrospectively 2 seconds afterwards because you've already made that decision.
00:25:10 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And when you're operating at that sort of pace and level, you can't sit in a courtroom and say, why did you make that decision under all that pressure?
00:25:18 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
Whereas what we're trying to do here is provide that accountability.
00:25:21 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So we can go back through.
00:25:23 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And the UK flying training system is very much about debriefing after a flight, learning from all those mistakes and going back and fixing it.
00:25:32 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And provided you're not making them two or three times the same mistake, then actually you improve and move on.
00:25:37 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And that's really what we've got to get to, is being more comfortable with being able to learn, do the lessons identified and lessons learned process.
00:25:45 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
within this system, which actually improves outcomes of everybody.
00:25:49 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And the people who come behind us are standing on the shoulders of the people who've gone before.
00:25:53 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And suddenly, actually, we are in a position where we can challenge the world properly by enabling these systems to function and operate within our command and control mechanisms that we put in place.
00:26:06 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, no, I think
00:26:08 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Being ex-military police, I've always had an interest in kind of biases and heuristics and how much that can, cloud our thinking in terms of, not actually understanding which of our decision-making process is in place at the time of when we have to make that decision.
00:26:23 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So, yeah, this is all this is all stuff which I think gives us like real accountability towards, you know, accountability and then trust as well in systems when you're using it in the military, because, you know, like you say, you pull that trigger
00:26:37 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
in the moment, and you could spend a long time regretting it afterwards, or you might be like, Well, I'm glad I took an extra second to wait for that situation, you know, just to evolve one second longer before I pulled that trigger, otherwise it could have been a very difficult outcome.
00:26:52 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
You know, I remember having being in Baghdad, having that same situation where I'm glad I forced myself to take an extra second before pulling a trigger, and I was like,
00:27:01 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
This is a glad, glad I didn't possibly get myself into a mess in that place, but anyway, let me there's a really interesting kind of point that I want to kind of bring out in this next question, because as I see your platform routes across multiple models like Claude, GPT, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, and obviously the, you know, the big well-known players.
00:27:25 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I mean, this is referred to as multi-model routing engine.
00:27:30 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Can you tell us a bit more about that?
00:27:32 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
How does that work, for example?
00:27:33 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Well, I'm saying they're too sensitive.
00:27:36 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I should come to this.
00:27:39 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So coming from a resilience perspective, my views have been that you've got to enable the system to go down and crash.
00:27:48 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
How does it keep going?
00:27:50 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So what we built into or baked in at the very beginning is actually, what models can we use safely and sensibly in the first instance?
00:28:00 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And then how can we then actually use them in the most effective and efficient way?
00:28:06 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And I think from an understanding, think of it like tasking with a staff headquarters, for example.
00:28:16 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
You don't send the intelligence officer to do the logistics plan.
00:28:19 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
Yeah, or maybe you should, I don't know, or maybe you should say it's a difficult to do the intelligence blur.
00:28:25 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
It's got a warning blur, isn't it?
00:28:28 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
Yeah, I think I may have to hide now, but you understand the point that actually what you've got.
00:28:35 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
specialist people who know what they're doing in those specialist areas.
00:28:38 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And we've got models that operate functionally better in certain areas and also some of them working in different jurisdictions.
00:28:46 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So actually there are different levels of classification that can be passed through one model versus another.
00:28:52 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And then there's a balance of risk between all of that as to which model operates where.
00:28:59 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And within a staff headquarters, the commander knows who to task for what.
00:29:02 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So what we've built is a system that is effectively a routing engine within our system that enables that top level information to go in.
00:29:13 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And then it's assessed against a set of criteria that we've built and tested and stress tested against what that looks like.
00:29:20 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
The nature of the task, the sensitivity of the data, the required response speed, because that can have an issue, as we said multiple times, the jurisdiction of the data.
00:29:30 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
and where that data needs to stay within that jurisdiction, and then the track record of how the models have worked with those similar tasks in the past.
00:29:41 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So, for example, we spoke about intelligence, so an open source intelligent task might root through Grok because it's live internet access, it's optimised for that type of synthesis, but a complex legal or technical analysis might go to Claude,
00:30:00 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
or it might actually go to a European Mistral or something else capability.
00:30:07 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So which handled that nuanced reasoning particularly well.
00:30:12 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So that's how we do it.
00:30:16 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So if you take sensitive personal data, targeting data, that actually should stay within the UK jurisdiction, and actually we wouldn't want a model running through the US
00:30:28 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
We'd want that running on sovereign infrastructure.
00:30:31 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And that's not because we don't trust the US as an ally and as a partner.
00:30:34 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
It's because actually we don't know what the next political steps are going to be, who could be empowering in five or 10 years' time.
00:30:40 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So we've got to be able to protect ourselves and make sure that what we're doing is that, and going back to Anthropic, if Anthropic got cut off tomorrow and you can't use Claude because there's a national security risk, but we've got multiple fallback options within our system that enables it to pick up and it picks the next BEX model to deliver that
00:30:58 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
deliver that capability.
00:30:59 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So it's almost like having, your first, second, and third reserves in effect, depending on what level of task you want to do and how they want to do it.
00:31:09 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, I was just going to jump in there.
00:31:11 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
It's essentially, it's, excuse the term, spread betting, you're spread betting your risk against multiple, you know, multiple platforms, I guess, rather than rather than all loading into, you know, onto one.
00:31:25 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So I think it's, yeah, spread betting and risk.
00:31:29 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
Yes.
00:31:30 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So I think what we're doing is, is it spread betting in that way?
00:31:36 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
Or is it spreading the resilience that we need in order to make sure that we can maintain 99.9% operational output at all times in degraded communication challenges and all of those other things?
00:31:51 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And I guess it's all about, and it's not about quality, not just about quality, it's about the appropriate risk allocation.
00:31:57 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So you wouldn't necessarily want some data going through to a Grok channel, even though that might give you a better OSINT response, because actually you want to hold that within a European jurisdiction for whatever operation you might well be doing, that you may not want that data to be hoovered in five years time,
00:32:19 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
under the Cloud Act to say, well, actually, UK, you did that, for example, or that financial decision there.
00:32:25 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So that multi-model routing within there is about making sure that you give the best outcome under the set of conditions that you've set, as in risk, security,
00:32:40 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
what the information is that you're doing, so that you are protecting your data, your people, your commercial infrastructure, your IP, and everything that goes with it.
00:32:50 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
Because if we're not careful, we do end up in a position where our data becomes our worst enemy because anyone, or not anybody, but some organisations may well be then to use that against us.
00:33:02 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, I totally agree.
00:33:03 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I mean, it's interesting.
00:33:05 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
The more we talk about it, the more I kind of think about our own kind of operations, with what the future looks like in design and kind of media around it, certainly around IP, because there's kind of like things like copyright issues, intellectual...
00:33:19 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
property is still a very vague, kind of vaguely understood subject, as in like how ideas spread, how, you take people take like some ideas, mash them with other ones, and who owns that, outcome, especially with, like these models of, say, if you're using them to help design a brand, for example, is then who owns that brand?
00:33:39 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Is it the company that you've passed the outcome, the assets to, or is it the company actually which helped you make those assets in the 1st place?
00:33:46 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
You know, if you kind of
00:33:48 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
have to then start kind of like carving away at where the, where the idea kind of originated from.
00:33:53 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So yeah, it's definitely got me thinking a lot around that as well.
00:33:59 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And that is a challenge and happy to engage with all that later after this, Chris, to resolve those issues for you.
00:34:07 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Thank you.
00:34:09 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
It could be one of those ones which have to kind of sit there with a wet cloth over their head for like a good few weeks and go, Right, what risk are we experiencing ourselves to actually come to think?
00:34:19 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So, it's interesting you say that, and without wanting to sell it, but we've put that exact thing as part of the mission of the site is to, you know, you can take the test.
00:34:29 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
and understand what risk your commercial business is at.
00:34:32 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
I think it's 36 questions we put together and it will give you your data exposure.
00:34:38 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And obviously we're more than happy to come and help fix it.
00:34:42 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
But it's a free online thing that we put together because it just helps people contextualise what that risk is, what they're sat with, you know, what a junior member of staff might be doing on ChatGPT to give a load of answers, you're actually potentially giving all of your information away.
00:34:59 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
unbeknownst to the organisation, because it's just easier and quicker to do it under pressure.
00:35:05 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And no matter what policy paper you've got, somebody's always going to work around it.
00:35:09 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, good to know.
00:35:12 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Definitely work with a lot of clients, actually you'll probably benefit from that.
00:35:16 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So I'm going to probably better do a few noses after this call.
00:35:21 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
Excellent.
00:35:23 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I mean, it has given us to the kind of next questions, I guess.
00:35:26 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
We won't be the only ones, but a lot of organisations do worry about losing control when it comes to introducing AI.
00:35:34 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I guess, how do you maintain that human aspect of it when whilst obviously still enabling, you know, AI operations?
00:35:42 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
How do you keep that human on the loop, in the loop, so to say?
00:35:49 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
Yeah, so I think that's probably
00:35:53 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And that's where mission command as a doctrine is genuinely more useful probably than anything the AI industry has produced on the subject, because that's how the military have operated and functioned for decades.
00:36:06 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And actually, that's what people learn to trust and learn how to operate with.
00:36:11 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And I think that mission command doctrine is pretty clear, isn't it?
00:36:15 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
That autonomy is not the same as abdication.
00:36:18 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And you can give, in an AI sense, an agent significant freedom of action, but within those defined constraints.
00:36:26 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So your left and right of art, your limit of exploitation from a military perspective.
00:36:30 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And it will just operate faster and at greater scale than any human can manage.
00:36:36 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And that's just the way it is.
00:36:39 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
But the human commander must still set that intent.
00:36:43 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
It must, he or she must still define those boundaries and more importantly have the ability to override any decisions or outcomes that have come in.
00:36:55 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So the human crucially carries that accountability all the way through.
00:36:59 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And the AI doesn't get to take the blame.
00:37:02 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And in the same way that you go on an operation and you wouldn't blame the troops for the failure of that operation.
00:37:08 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
That is a commander's responsibility.
00:37:10 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
We've got to done that.
00:37:11 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
We've executed, we've trained, we've done anything together.
00:37:13 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
Actually, this whole mission command doctrine, you can't just say, oh, ChatGPT told me to do it.
00:37:18 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
Because actually our system has built that.
00:37:21 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
safety guardrails into it where the commander is providing that intent, those boundaries and everything.
00:37:28 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And therefore, he or she can say no, yes, or just execute at speed.
00:37:34 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So I guess for, you can either set it up to operate autonomously, semi-commanded or commanded within our system, which enables you to learn how it works.
00:37:47 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
what you can let go of.
00:37:49 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And as you get to work with the system more and more, you can give it more and more responsibility.
00:37:53 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
But you've still got to remain accountable for those decisions, which I felt has always been something that I'd always prepared to do, stand up and take the hit on behalf of the team as a commander, because that's what you've got to do.
00:38:07 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And I think that still remains the same for AI.
00:38:10 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
AI is not going to take away responsibility, but the mission command doctrine
00:38:14 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
enables it to exponentially grow and work at a much quicker pace than if you're telling it, do this, do this, do this, then do this.
00:38:23 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
What we're giving is the opportunity to go and make the magic happen, but not overstep it or overreach what it's doing for that specific task.
00:38:32 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And that, I think, is where...
00:38:35 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
where it all comes together.
00:38:37 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And I think it's just about appropriate calibration, isn't it?
00:38:39 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And that it's applied uniformly across the whole spectrum of what you're trying to do within that organisation and reducing as much friction as possible.
00:38:49 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
Or is it a good commander doesn't approve every ammunition request, but they do authorise the rules of engagement, you know, so that's...
00:38:58 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
That pretty much is what it is at, you can you set those set it all up and let's make it safe and it's executable for everybody.
00:39:08 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, fascinating stuff.
00:39:10 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I'd love to I'd love to kind of see where this where we end up in five years time.
00:39:14 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I think after our conversation there's it's progressing at such a rapid pace and it almost only feels like a few years ago that you know that ChatGPT came onto the scene now and it feels like now that every other conversation is around AI and
00:39:29 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
like affiliated risks, opportunities, strengths and weaknesses and stuff.
00:39:33 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And I think it's interesting that because people talk about the AI bubble bursting and the AI bubble will burst if people don't grip what we're talking about today.
00:39:43 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
Because this is what AI was all about.
00:39:46 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And I remember in the early days, a CEO wrote, well, I asked it to write me a report.
00:39:52 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
Well, it can't write you a report because you've got no context for it.
00:39:58 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So, and that stuck with me quite a block, because actually AI should be able to write your report, but actually AI's got to know who you are, the context of your request, and what you're doing.
00:40:09 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So, if you build that into an organisation, so that as you log on as Chris Shirley, CEO of multiple cool design agencies, and you know, Guinness World Record nutter and faller off of mountains, dude, is that
00:40:23 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
is that when you ask it a question to give me a report on the weather in Nepal or whatever that might be, it will know that it's a Chris Shirley designated question.
00:40:32 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So it's going to do it at a mountain level, it's going to do your snow report, it's going to do your winds, it's going to do your clouds, rather than maybe Mrs.
00:40:39 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
Shirley who might be sunbathing on the lower slopes and enjoying the better weather.
00:40:44 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
I say that in a very sexist way, by the way, lest I get shot.
00:40:47 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
But the point I'm trying to make is that the different people have got different outcomes.
00:40:51 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
and providing you've enabled the system to understand who you are, what you are doing, then you give me a report on X and it will give you a dedicated report to what you need for your context and environment.
00:41:04 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And that's what we've built it to do and trained it to do, and you can run that across any environment and any system.
00:41:10 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, it kind of harks back to the old military saying, isn't it?
00:41:13 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Feed the beast.
00:41:14 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
When you're...
00:41:15 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
which is, a term we used to use for sending radio reports back to zero, was that, you can't expect the QRF to come out and help you if they've got no idea where you are, where you've just come from, what you've been doing, what's all this sort of stuff is that you can't expect them to, because it's risk for them as well.
00:41:32 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And in the same way of reputational risk for an AI model is you've got to feed it information so that actually then it spits you out things that are actually useful, not just
00:41:40 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
here, okay, Mr Shelley, here's a report on the weather in, like you say, Kathmandu or, you know, somewhere else random where you've got no interest in and probably low likelihood of being because you'll just, you'll have a poor user experience with it and you'll be like, oh, this AI is rubbish.
00:41:54 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And it's like, no, you just haven't, you haven't trained it properly, you haven't developed it properly, you haven't fed it the things that you want it to spit out in the future.
00:42:03 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So, you know, we're always interested to hear from organisations that want to contribute their thoughts to our articles.
00:42:08 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
If this is you, send it to the e-mail newsletter to stay up to date on what we're working on.
00:42:12 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
There's a link in the show notes.
00:42:13 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Otherwise, back to the episode.
00:42:17 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
Yeah, and that reminds me of my very, very early staff officer days, being thrashed into my life with more red pen over my paperwork than ever wanted.
00:42:28 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
It's actually, you know, one looks at it as character building now.
00:42:31 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
At the time it's like, oh my God, I've got to go and rewrite all this stuff again, because I completely missed the intent and the, you know, what actually the boss was after.
00:42:39 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
But, and again, those formative years have helped me form this sort of understanding actually of what actually you need to grow.
00:42:47 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And I guess I look back over my thousand days of ChatGPT a couple of months ago, and actually my thousand, my first few days of ChatGPT was,
00:42:57 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
James Milne's the early young idiot staff officer who probably just wanted to be out running around doing cool stuff rather than sat writing papers.
00:43:05 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And actually, as you grow and have to go through the different levels of staff and command and end of advanced staff college and doing all those different next bit of things, actually you've grown and developed.
00:43:16 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And so what I've done with our system, I've grown and developed that staff officer through what was effectively my checkered military career of trying to get things right under pressure and under time.
00:43:27 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
But if you get the theory right, and I say if you understand...
00:43:32 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
command, you understand how to command AI, so you're not commanded by it.
00:43:37 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And I think that is the real crux of the matter, which is why mission command is so important, and which is why the whole mission ops AI thing is all about facilitating and enabling that in multiple sectors, because actually it's just good leadership.
00:43:54 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
More than anything.
00:43:56 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, no, you said actually something that you said like a real good sound bite then, which I think you should use at some point in...
00:44:02 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
your marketing, whatever, commanding AI, not commanded by AI.
00:44:05 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
That's a really, really kind of powerful kind of idea metaphor there.
00:44:11 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I think that's something which will, you know, I think I put that on LinkedIn last last year sometime.
00:44:16 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
Oh, really?
00:44:17 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
Oh, my gosh.
00:44:20 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
No, it just got brushed aside.
00:44:21 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
I was that lunatic talking about.
00:44:25 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
But yeah, but that is what it's at, because it's the hype, it's not about the hype, it's about understanding, and it's understanding how people work as well, because actually, ironically, AI responds quite similarly to the way that people respond if they're not given the right information in the right context, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
00:44:45 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
100%, yeah.
00:44:45 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Well, it did get me onto my penultimate question and something we were talking about earlier, which I just want to kind of loop back around and
00:44:52 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
and make sure we cover in enough depth.
00:44:54 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And as the concept of sovereign infrastructure is an increasingly important topic, obviously, given everything that's going on in the world right now, especially for Europe, when we're kind of, where we're kind of sandwiched between obviously Asia, the US, you know, and like competing, competing ideas on how AI, how AI and data like look in the future.
00:45:16 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Why is it critical that AI platforms operating in sensitive sectors like defence, like medicine, like fintech, operate on sovereign infrastructure?
00:45:24 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Just so I can make sure we've definitely got that kind of idea kind of squared away.
00:45:31 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So I mean, the short answer is jurisdiction.
00:45:35 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
It's where the data physically sits matters, but it matters a lot less than people think compared to the question of,
00:45:45 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
whose law governs access to that data, and who controls the infrastructure processing it.
00:45:52 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
I think we've spoken earlier today about this very thing.
00:45:55 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
The US Cloud Act means that US authorities can compel, not just us, but compel any US technology company to hand over data, regardless of where it's physically stored.
00:46:08 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So Microsoft, Google, AWS,
00:46:12 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
the GPT, ChatGPT, all of, they can be compelled should the US government decide so to hand over all of that data.
00:46:22 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So any UK organisation that's using US hosted AI platform or infrastructure or data handling, even with data centers in Ireland, Frankfurt, Helsinki, has a sovereignty problem.
00:46:38 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
It's not a geography problem, it's a sovereignty problem.
00:46:42 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And certainly in Europe, this is becoming more and more critical.
00:46:46 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
As you rightly said, we're in a period of change and challenge and digital sovereignty is becoming genuinely contested.
00:46:55 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And I think where we've come to, and even at the Dake conference yesterday, which was Monday the 16th,
00:47:02 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
You know, we had the chief data officer from the US talking about data security, all the big players, US hyperscalers talking about how their agents are operating at the edge and at the front, which is fantastic commercially.
00:47:15 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
But from a sovereign AI perspective, you know, my heart is in the bottom of my boots because we are about to give all of our data, all of our secrets away without even realizing it.
00:47:27 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And if we're not careful,
00:47:29 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
you know, everything will be gone.
00:47:31 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
It's just that sensitive data is just lost.
00:47:35 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So the whole point around what we've done is that we've taken out that hyperscaler risk and that you can build all that infrastructure, all that AI magic on servers that sit, you know, for example, for you, we could put a server in your kitchen and that's your server done, dusted, airlocked, blocks away with all the magic happening on it with
00:47:59 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
apps that run not through Apple that run on your phone and everything else.
00:48:04 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So the whole point is that you own that entire data stack and that's something that people haven't or organisations are only just now starting to realise and come the day of the first legal case where your shoe size and shirt size is leaked to a
00:48:20 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
a US company, that is going to be a real headache for not only the legal system, but for anybody who falls foul of the EU AI Data Act, which is 35 million euros worth of fines and more at times.
00:48:37 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So this data sovereignty is something that is, it is the oil tanker coming out of the mist.
00:48:44 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
The US set it all up to defend their rights and look after what makes America fantastic.
00:48:50 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
The problem that we've all got is that, unbeknownst to ourselves, we've just sort of become sucked into that, I say, self-protection.
00:48:59 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
We now need to do our own bit of self-protection.
00:49:01 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
This isn't anti-US.
00:49:02 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
This isn't anti-China.
00:49:03 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
This isn't anti-anything else.
00:49:05 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
This is all about protecting our own interests, be that UK, France, Germany, Finland, Sweden, whoever those countries are, NATO-wide, to enable to function and operate
00:49:17 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
with their capabilities, equipment, and people, without the fear of somebody being able to flick a switch somewhere else, and/or all of your data being sucked away, all of your targeting data, what you're doing, where you're going, what you're doing, taken away and analysed elsewhere, and then being either how to account for it, or being stopped from continuing to do an operation that you want to do, that's not got authority or deemed authority from Big Brother, for want of another term.
00:49:44 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So yeah, it's a challenge.
00:49:46 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I was having this conversation the other day as well, as I think people are going to realise just how much we're moving into that era of uncrewed systems, be it on land, on sea, in air, just how important all this stuff will, be because it's, we're the soldiers moving further and further away from the front line, so to speak.
00:50:07 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
And actually, it's becoming more autonomous, and actually, if you turn off that capability of using an system to strike, then it's like, and you've got a very poor, poorly trained or inexperienced unit that has to go in there and solve that problem whilst we're, then wrangling over legalities, jurisdictions, and stuff, as it causes, it bakes in lots of problems that you
00:50:29 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I probably didn't have the time or mental bandwidth to solve.
00:50:33 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I say you, as in governments, jurisdictions, countries to solve, yeah, so you can see why this is important now.
00:50:42 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And imagine it where you're in operations and it's got something nothing to do with your, what you're doing operationally, but as we've seen in the US where anthropic becomes a risk to national security and
00:50:56 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
and gets turned off.
00:50:57 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And if you're based on anthropic systems, for example, then your whole system stops dead in the water, gone.
00:51:03 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
You've got no control over that.
00:51:04 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And that's because somebody might have given the president the wrong flipping sandwich at the cocktail party.
00:51:11 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
He says in jest, but you don't know how these things are going to play out.
00:51:15 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And actually, suddenly your operational, your tactical, operational, strategic risks become huge through something you've got absolutely no control over whatsoever.
00:51:26 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And that for me is always something, and commercially I've fallen foul of it as well, where people own capabilities and then they take it away from you because they want to go and do something else.
00:51:34 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And you've spent years developing an opportunity and you've gone.
00:51:39 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So I felt that personally in the commercial world as well as in the military world.
00:51:43 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So standing by for that is really, it's a really interesting sort of set of dynamics that we're going to have to deal with, and exciting as well though, this is a great challenge to have.
00:51:54 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
and something that actually we all need to embrace rather than be fearful of.
00:51:57 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
just get on board with it.
00:51:59 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
Let's go make it happen and make us all as good as we can be.
00:52:03 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Yeah, 100%.
00:52:03 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Well, I realise you're taking up almost an hour of your time now, so I'll roll into the final question if that's okay, and I can give you your afternoon back.
00:52:11 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
It's my favourite question of a lot of these podcasts is what's next?
00:52:15 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
What does the future look like for MissionOps AI?
00:52:19 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
does this, does this ecosystem spin off kind of platforms?
00:52:24 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Is it, does it become like entire operating systems?
00:52:27 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Is, what's the future for MissionOps AI?
00:52:32 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
To put you on the spot.
00:52:35 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So, all three in sequence.
00:52:40 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
Nothing like a question like that, is it?
00:52:41 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
Yeah, everything, Chris, of course, you know, that's what you can do.
00:52:47 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So I think it's quite interesting because we did what we did because there was a challenge that I felt needed fixing that was coming down the tubes, right?
00:52:58 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
Yeah, yeah.
00:53:00 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So I guess in the near term, what we've got is our MissionOps AI platform, which effectively we've built Microsoft, Google, so we've got e-mail, we've got chat, we've got a whole operating system that functions within that.
00:53:16 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And that AI orchestration level within there that you can then feed off into whatever organisation you need to go and work with.
00:53:24 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So they can deploy that capability on their regulated infrastructure, which meets their governance requirements.
00:53:30 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And that enables functional operations like today, basically.
00:53:37 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
As that sort of grows, the ecosystem around it, and this has already started happening, by the way.
00:53:42 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
since we agreed to make this podcast, things are driving at a massively fast rate at the moment.
00:53:51 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And this ecosystem sort of comes out really, and because we've created this governance, this governed environment, what it means is that you can then build almost whatever you want onto that.
00:54:03 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So one of the things we looked at, so it's not only just the platform, the specialized agents that you need,
00:54:11 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
to actually get that to work.
00:54:15 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
One of the things I think I mentioned over messaging was sovereign skies, which is a counter UAS capability that feeds in all the data from all the platforms, it's sovereign.
00:54:29 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
So it means that actually all that is working in the background on your own servers, putting in any feeds you need, whatever radar feeds, whatever defeat feeds, you can put in phalanx guns, you can put in
00:54:41 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
lasers, you can do whatever you want, but actually you can control all of those bits within that system on sovereign platform and enable it to happen.
00:54:50 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And then I think the longer horizon is an operating system for AI-driven missions.
00:54:57 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
Why not?
00:54:58 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
There's no reason as it builds that we can actually make it become the same way that Windows and Linux and all those sort of things became the layer that everything else runs on.
00:55:08 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
I believe that this could become the critical infrastructure for AI, or variations thereof.
00:55:15 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
It's the governance, the orchestration, the audit, the sovereignty controls.
00:55:20 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
It just gives you everything you need in a standardised package that means that you can operate it in a trusted manner.
00:55:30 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And I think that every organisation is trying to solve this problem now from scratch.
00:55:35 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
at poorly and probably with significant risk.
00:55:39 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
Do you know what, the silly bloke with a good idea a long time ago to see could I actually get this to work, we actually got it to work and actually I think it solved a lot of problems that for me, I'm just delighted that we actually achieved it.
00:55:56 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
Where it goes is anyone's, I'm not anyone's guess now, but I'm hopeful that perhaps some of our listeners here will understand
00:56:04 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
what we've achieved and how we're achieving it and how we want to support those organisations going forward to make a more robust and resilient UK and Europe.
00:56:14 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And that cuts across everything from local government to defence manufacturing to critical national infrastructure.
00:56:22 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
It's all got to be looked after properly.
00:56:26 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
And it's all about data, data, data, data, and the speed at which you can operate and look after that data.
00:56:33 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
It's going to become the critical player in the future.
00:56:36 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Completely agree, completely agree.
00:56:38 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
Well, James, I realise that's been absolutely fantastic.
00:56:41 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
I realise you're taking up well over an hour of your time.
00:56:44 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
So thank you very much again.
00:56:45 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
It's been fascinating.
00:56:47 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
Brilliant.
00:56:47 James Milnes, founder of MissionOpsAI, a UK-based defence tech company focused on bringing ‘Mission Command’ governance and data sovereignty to defence.
Chris, thank you for your time and amazing what you're doing across defense, by the way, doing this, so keep it up.
00:56:53 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
It was really great talking to James about what Mission Ops AI is creating.
00:56:56 Chris Shirley MA FRGS, Website Developer, Communications Specialist and Brand Designer at Hiatus,The Defence Design and Communications Agency
If you want to hear more about their work, check out the show notes below, and we'll see you next time.
