Picture a vessel carrying thousands of pounds of narcotics toward U.S. shores. The ship runs with no transponder or electronic trace, slipping through open waters under cloud cover. Overhead, a network of advanced satellites capture every movement. Within minutes, automated systems fuse imagery, signals and open-source data, alerting analysts who can pinpoint the ship’s location and intercept it before it reaches land.
That’s the kind of coordination national security leaders are striving to make routine, and it depends on the ability to turn data into clear, actionable insight. However, while the limiting factor used to be access to enough data, Nicholas Bousquet, vice president of strategy for the intelligence community at GRVTY, stated that national security leaders now face the challenge of navigating an influx.
“What we’ve seen in the last decade or so is a paradigm shift,” he said. “We have so much data gathered and so much data produced by our adversaries that now it’s about cutting through the noise.”
That shift fundamentally changes how the U.S. must think about establishing superiority in an increasingly contested world.
“I don’t think it’s going to be about who has the most platforms or who deploys them to project the most power,” Bousquet said. “It’s going to be about who can expedite decision-making in a way that allows them to take advantage of the data and drop all the other junk on the floor that doesn’t matter.”
The future is mission-centered design
Artificial intelligence plays a transformational role in how agencies process information, but it is not a substitute for human expertise.
“AI is not going to replace people. It simply doesn’t,” Bousquet said. “It’s not about quantifying intelligence production but qualifying those impacts. You need people to understand what those qualifiers are, and AI is a tool to get there.”
The best way to do that is to place AI and automation directly in the hands of analysts. Top-down mandates for technology don’t always work, often ending with millions spent on technology expenditures that fail because they don’t have practical value for end users.
“One thing you can’t do is win against the mission user. The analyst will decide if they’ll use it or not, full stop,” said Bousquet, advocating for what he calls “human-centered” or “mission-centered design,” meaning tools should be decided on and shaped by those who will actually use them in the field.
Moreover, AI’s true value is realized when it coordinates with other data systems. While generative AI and large language models excel in contextualizing information, they can also be paired with relational databases and ontologies to orchestrate data and create a bigger picture.
Integrating multi-source intelligence with Origin
Transforming overwhelming data into timely, relevant insight is at the core of GRVTY’s mission, focusing on making sense of operational needs rather than adding more capabilities to an already crowded landscape. That philosophy drives Origin, GRVTY’s automated intelligence platform that supports the full intelligence cycle from collection to decision.
“It gives you a one-stop shop to look through the entire tasking, collection, processing, exploitation and dissemination cycle,” Bousquet said. “Origin lets you log into a single view, see your current and upcoming collection, targets of interest and a common intelligence picture that you can query in real time.”
The platform’s relational databases and large language model assistance help analysts identify patterns that humans cannot easily detect. That agility is critical in time-sensitive missions such as counterterrorism operations, where reports must be generated in minutes, not days.
Origin’s modular architecture also ensures interoperability across government and commercial systems. GRVTY is working with national security organizations, such as the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, to connect assets, enhance visibility across domains and maintain the full range of Origin’s capabilities.
“Activity-based intelligence is always going to be golden,” Bousquet explained. “What GRVTY did was open the aperture of available data, aggregating across commercial constellations and other sources. That approach has directly enabled interdictions of massive amounts of illegal drugs and allowed us to track dark vessels at sea, and that was only made possible through some of the technologies we deployed.”
Outpacing a rapidly evolving threatscape
Historically, agencies have had to choose between slow-moving legacy technologies that can’t keep pace with mission demands, or adopting cutting-edge tools that struggle to integrate across domains and interface with complex enterprise systems. As emerging technologies proliferate, Bousquet said agencies must learn to balance innovation with integration.
“Commercial assets are being launched daily at a rate that’s outpacing government assets,” he noted. “To not take full advantage of them is foolhardy if we want to outpace our adversaries.”
GRVTY’s “mission-bred” teams, including experts in data science, analytics and systems engineering, bridge that divide by blending new technology with the assured delivery of traditional systems.
“I think what we’re really hoping to do is bring the best of both of those worlds together to be able to expedite that deployment without giving up the security of a person that understands the mission and the need in the environment,” Bousquet said.
Looking ahead, maintaining the nation’s competitive edge will also require a faster, more adaptive mindset.
“It can take our government years to get a new satellite in the sky,” Bousquet explained. “Meanwhile, China will throw 15 satellites up there, and if one works, they’re still operationally and financially ahead of us.”
Adopting a fail fast mentality, he added, that allows mission users to test different technologies, platforms and processes against each other is key to success.
“No matter how great the technology is, if users aren’t part of the process at every level, we’re not going to get there,” he said. “We need the analysts and operators helping to adopt and develop these tools. That’s how we win.”