Coffee & Conversation with CIA

On January 29, INSA hosted a virtual Coffee & Conversation with CIA's Larry Taxon, Digital Capabilities Delivery Executive, Israel Soong, Deputy Director, Office of AI, and moderator John Doyon, Executive VP, INSA.

In the 45-minute conversation, Mr. Taxson and Mr. Soong discussed how the CIA is building secure cloud and AI capabilities to strengthen mission delivery. Both speakers emphasized that achieving a true “digital advantage” depends not only on adopting new technologies but on integrating them into CIA operational workflows in ways that are resilient, scalable, and trusted by the workforce.

They highlighted that the CIA’s AI stack is built upon strong enterprise IT and cloud foundations. They noted an increasing focus on data management and vectorization, as well as the need for key enabling technologies such as network-defined virtual architectures and secure approaches that support cross-team collaboration, stressing the importance of deploying capabilities end-to-end across the enterprise, including in air-gapped and classified environments.

A major theme was the shift across the IC from compliance-based security toward continuous risk management. The speakers explained that industry partners must design solutions that can operate securely across low- and high-side networks while maintaining resiliency. They also identified secure edge computing as a pressing mission need, as CIA operations increasingly require AI-enabled processing closer to where intelligence is collected and used.

On AI governance, the speakers noted that building trust remains one of the hardest challenges in deploying AI within classified environments. Ensuring that systems are secure, fair, and operationally reliable is essential, but officers must also have confidence in these tools before they can be fully integrated into mission workflows. They added that human judgment remains central, particularly in applications such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), where maintaining a clear human footprint is critical.

Looking ahead, Mr. Taxson and Mr. Soong described agentic AI as an emerging capability with relevance across every CIA directorate, highlighting content triage as a key use case to help officers prioritize large volumes of information and translate it into actionable intelligence. They stressed that this evolution must remain deliberate and mission-driven and encouraged industry partners to better understand CIA operational constraints and validate that solutions can function within Agency networks.

In closing, they reiterated that the CIA’s future digital advantage will depend on secure, mission-integrated AI capabilities built on resilient infrastructure and responsible governance.