AI, machine learning, and data science will be used to create some of the most compelling technological advancements of the next decade. The OODA team will continue to expand our reporting on AI issues.
Recent OODA analysis on Artificial Intelligence:
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The financial sector’s AI acceleration story is ultimately about more than banking, markets, or digital payments. It is about the emergence of a new operational architecture for global economic coordination.
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Between 2021 and 2025, healthcare, cybersecurity, and the financial sector became live operational laboratories for accelerating artificial intelligence. What emerged is a new operational environment.
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Manufacturing has always run on precision, repetition, and scale. Those same qualities make it a natural fit for artificial intelligence. AI has always been discussed in manufacturing, but the conversation has shifted. Increasingly it is about speed and diffusion of AI in service to outcomes in manufacturing. The question now is how fast manufacturing firms…
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We are seeing key insights that boards and CEOs need to internalize: the shift to probabilistic agents running at machine speed, humans optimizing solely for efficiency, and autonomous systems operating without human oversight.
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Our methodology for assessing organizational use of AI is the AI Acceleration Quotient. This post describes how to do repeatable standard assessments of AI using the same professional methodologies we use at OODA.
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Accelerationism is a system condition in which technological, geopolitical, economic, and social forces collide faster than institutions can adapt. This geopolitical conflict analysis is now visible in real time through the unfolding Iran conflict.
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A recent OODA Network survey on Compounding Accelerations reflects a network actively grappling with the convergence of multiple high-velocity forces and the growing realization that risk is no longer linear, isolated, or slow-moving.
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The recent U.S.-Iran conflict has proven that cyberspace is not always a supporting domain, but one that could be decisive for victory.
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Co-authored by R “Ray” Wang, Vala Afshar, and Dr. David Bray Editor’s Note: This article represents the second OODA Loop collaboration among R “Ray” Wang, CEO of Constellation Research; Vala Afshar, Chief Digital Evangelist at Salesforce; and Dr. David Bray, Chair of the Accelerator and Distinguished Fellow at the Stimson Center. Executive Summary: Two days…
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By Trent R. Teyema, DSc and David Bray, PhD The Strategic Shift: From Software Defense to Hardware Verification The cybersecurity landscape is undergoing a fundamental transformation. How can organizations verify the integrity of the technology infrastructure they depend on when adversaries have moved beyond software exploits to compromise the silicon itself? We are witnessing a…
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By Vala Afshar, R “Ray” Wang”, and David Bray, PhD As AI-generated employees infiltrate workforces, hardware arrives pre-compromised, and nation-states deploy Cold War tactics against corporations, organizations need a unified approach that works across security, operations, and leadership. Editor’s Note: This article represents the first OODA Loop collaboration among R “Ray” Wang, CEO of Constellation…
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Claude Mythos Shows Why Technological Advancement Outpaces Risk Mitigation Anthropic’s Claude Mythos marks a watershed moment for artificial intelligence (AI) and information security. While the technical achievements of this frontier model are undeniable, its arrival signals a troubling shift in the global cybersecurity environment, one that favors the aggressor and further erodes the already tenuous…
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In this post, we examine a new class of organization: the AI-native company. These are companies born in the age of Generative and Agentic AI, which have been designed from inception to leverage powerful new capabilities.
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Enterprise AI is in the middle of an architectural transition that most organizations have not named correctly. The shift from single foundation models to tiered, federated, agentic systems is not a capability story instead it is an economics, governance, and operational story. This three-part series distills the key findings from a set of in-depth technical…
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Relevance Reboot – AI’s Galileo Moment In my last essay, I wrote about my personal journey with staying relevant. The learning posture, the mirror test, knowing when it’s five to twelve. But underneath those tactical questions is something deeper: what IS relevance when AI is fundamentally changing what we mean by intelligence and value? That’s…
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Enterprise AI is in the middle of an architectural transition that most organizations have not named correctly. The shift from single foundation models to tiered, federated, agentic systems is not a capability story instead it is an economics, governance, and operational story. This three-part series distills the key findings from a set of in-depth technical…
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Enterprise AI is in the middle of an architectural transition that most organizations have not named correctly. The shift from single foundation models to tiered, federated, agentic systems is not a capability story instead it is an economics, governance, and operational story. This three-part series distills the key findings from a set of in-depth technical…
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Introduction Each year, the OODA Almanac is the most provocative piece we publish. We take the opportunity not only to provoke your thinking with disruptive ideas but to peer over the edge into the emergent future. In past years we have charted exponential disruption, jagged transitions, reorientation, and whiplash. This year the theme is re-anchoring,…
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By Dr. David Bray and Jeff Jonas Executive Summary The democratization of technology has created the democratization of danger. Individuals and small groups can now deploy drones, personal robots, gene-editing tools, and other accessible technologies to cause harm that once required nation-state resources. The most dangerous response to this reality is fear-driven overreach—a “knee-jerk overswing”…
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The emerging evidence suggests AI is not failing because it lacks capability, but because organizations are stalling at the bottom of a productivity J-curve, where measurement gaps, governance friction, and rework overwhelm early gains.
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As autonomous, goal-driven systems move from copilots to decision-makers, Agentic AI is reshaping warfare, intelligence, and influence operations – while simultaneously expanding the attack surface across data, models, agents, and human trust.
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As the earliest large-scale adopter of AI, healthcare demonstrated the promise and peril of accelerated innovation—revealing where algorithmic tools deliver breakthroughs and where they generate unacceptable risk.
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Applying AI inside a complex enterprise is not an academic exercise or a vendor demo; it is hard, operational work that succeeds or fails in the real world of customers, regulators, boards, and bottom lines. This guide is written from that front line. It distills lessons from practitioners who have spent years helping enterprises design,…
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In her most recent essay for Foreign Affairs, the former CISA Director argues that insecure code and poor design drive persistent vulnerabilities, and that artificial intelligence (AI) offers the only realistic path to systemic resilience.
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Energy has become the limiting factor for technological acceleration: no longer a background constraint. Energy is rapidly becoming the primary strategic asset shaping AI, national security, industrial competitiveness, and geopolitical alignment.
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OODA Network Member Bill Vass (Booz Allen Chief Technology Officer) and Booz Allen SVP Munjeet Singh showed how physical AI, digital proving grounds, and agentic autonomy are converging to reshape real-world robotics, test ranges, and national-security missions.
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OODA network members have access to an extensive repository of research and analysis on the impact of technology on geopolitics, business strategy and cybersecurity. This human generated, expert vetted information created to inform decisions of our membership, and has always been available by both search and topical categorization. These insights now form the foundation of…
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This OODAcon 2025 session convened an all-star panel of national security technologists to examine how AI, automation, and space systems are reshaping the modernization of the U.S. military.
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Welcome to 9th edition of my annual top 10 books list! Each year, I read close to 100 books and distill down my 10 favorite security, technology and business books into this top 10 list and also include my favorite fiction books of year and a handful of honorable mentions that didn’t make the top…
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AI’s diffusion is now inseparable from its compute infrastructure. 2025 marks the year when nations and hyperscalers began measuring, monetizing, and governing “AI compute” as a strategic asset, linking sovereign cloud capacity, public-private infrastructure build-outs, and the spread of AI capabilities across sectors and economies.
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In my recent invited Congressional expert witness testimony before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, Artificial Intelligence, and the Internet, I emphasized that the United States is experiencing multiple simultaneous tech revolutions beyond just AI. As we navigate advances in space tech, biotech, quantum tech, and the miniaturization of sensors and…
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Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming how U.S. capital and derivatives markets operate — from trading algorithms and risk models to regulatory surveillance — raising new systemic, cybersecurity, and accountability challenges that Congress and regulators must address.
OODA Loop Analysis
The Executive’s Guide To Artificial Intelligence: What you need to know about what really works and what comes next – The megatrend of Artificial Intelligence is transforming the algorithms of business in exciting ways.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Testifies on “Oversight of A.I.: Rules for Artificial Intelligence” – Fast on the heels of his May 4th meeting at the White House with Vice President Kamala Harris and other top administration officials to discuss responsible AI innovation, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman
NIST Makes Available the Voluntary Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Framework (AI RMF 1.0) and the AI RMF Playbook – NIST’s Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Framework (AI RMF 1.0) “The U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has released its Artificial Intelligence
Using Artificial Intelligence For Competitive Advantage in Business – AI technologies are making continuous advances in domains like industrial robotics, logistics, speech recognition and translation, banking, medicine and advanced scientific research. But in almost every case, the cutting edge AI that drives the advances drops from attention, becoming almost invisible when it becomes part of the overall system.
The Future of Enterprise Artificial Intelligence – A short overview of the business aspects of AI focused on informing decisions including due diligence.
Opportunities for Advantage: Measuring Trends in Artificial Intelligence – A summary post of major trends.
AI Security: Four Things to Focus on Right Now – This is the only security framework we have seen that helps prevent AI issues before they develop
When Artificial Intelligence Goes Wrong – By studying issues we can help mitigate them
The Future of AI Policy is Largely Unwritten – Congressman Will Hurd provides insight on the emerging technologies of AI and Machine Learning.
AI Will Test American Values In The Battlefield – How will military leaders deal with AI that may treat troops as expendable assets to win the “game”.
The AI Capabilities DoD Says They Need The Most – Savvy businesses will pay attention to what this major customer wants.
What Leaders Need to Know About the State of Natural Language Processing – Major improvements in the ability of computers to understand what humans write, say and search are being fielded. These improvements are significant, and will end up changing just about every industry in the world. But at this point they are getting little notice outside a narrow segment of experts.
NATO and US DoD AI Strategies Align with over 80 International Declarations on AI Ethics – NATO’s release in October of its first-ever strategy for artificial intelligence is primarily concerned with the impact AI will have on the NATO core commitments of collective defense, crisis management, and cooperative security. Worth a deeper dive is a framework within the overall NATO AI Strategy, which mirrors that of the DoD Joint Artificial Intelligence Center’s (JAIC) efforts to establish norms around AI: “NATO establishes standards of responsible use of AI technologies, in accordance with international law and NATO’s values.” At the center of the NATO AI strategy are the following six principles: Lawfulness, Responsibility and Accountability, Explainability and Traceability, Reliability, Governability, and Bias Mitigation.”
“AI Accidents” framework from the Georgetown University CSET – The Center for Security and Emerging Technology) (CSET) in a July 2021 policy brief, “AI Accidents: An Emerging Threat – What Could Happen and What to Do,” makes a noteworthy contribution to current efforts by governmental entities, industry, AI think tanks and academia to “name and frame” the critical issues surrounding AI risk probability and impact. For the current enterprise, as we pointed out as early as 2019 in Securing AI – Four Areas to Focus on Right Now, the fact still remains that “having a robust AI security strategy is a precursor that positions the enterprise to address these critical AI issues.” In addition, enterprises which have adopted and deployed AI systems also need to commit to the systematic logging and analysis of AI-related accidents and incidents.
DHS Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) releases Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) Strategic Plan Amidst Flurry of USG-wide AI/ML RFIs – An artificial intelligence security strategy (see “Securing AI – Four Areas to Focus on Right Now”) should be the cornerstone of any AI and machine learning (ML) efforts within your enterprise. We also recently outlined the need for enterprises to further operationalize the logging and analysis of artificial intelligence (AI) related accidents and incidents based on an “AI Accidents” framework from the Georgetown University CSET. The best analysis is a sophisticated body of work on AI-related issues of morality, ethics, fairness, explainable and interpretable AI, bias, privacy, adversarial behaviors, trust, fairness, evaluation, testing and compliance.
AI-Based Ambient Intelligence Innovation in Healthcare and the Future of Public Safety – Disaster conditions will clearly be more impactful and more frequent due to the impact of climate change. The domestic terrorism threat stateside is becoming a constant, with the impact and frequency of growing domestic U.S. political instability and public safety incidents to be determined. We will need systems that are monitoring these temporal, ephemeral ecosystems and providing insights and recommendations for real-time decision-making support and situational awareness analysis. What can AI-Based Ambient Intelligence Innovation in Healthcare teach us?
The Future of War, Information, AI Systems and Intelligence Analysis – The U.S. is in a struggle to maintain its dominance in air, land, sea, space, and cyberspace over countries with capabilities increasingly on par in all domains with that of the U.S. In addition, information (in all its forms) is the center of gravity of a broad set of challenges faced by the United States. Information, then, is the clear strategic vector of value creation for the emergence of applied technologies to enable operational innovation. For the U.S., the desired outcome is continued dominance for another American Century. For the Chinese, military capabilities usher in the dawn of a new technological superiority and, as a result, geopolitical and military dominance on the world stage.
Katharina McFarland on Winning in the Age of Artificial Intelligence – Katharina McFarland has led change in a wide array of national security domains including Space, Missile Defense, Acquisition and Nuclear Posture. She is a former Assistant Secretary of Defense
