UK AI start-up secures first ever software Agreement Lite with MOD

Homeland September 24, 2024

Co-founders Shefali Sharma (L) and Eddie Jackson (R) in front of the servers being used for AVIS processing to support strategic government decision making.

AI & robotics start-up Oxford Dynamics has secured an Enterprise Agreement Lite with the UK Ministry of Defence worth up to £2M for its generative AI technology to assist with the searching, interrogation and summarising of complex data. This is the first AI focused EA Lite contract of its type to be awarded by the MoD to a company, demonstrating the desire to use the innovative technology of cutting-edge UK start-ups to solve government challenges.

Most governments and their various agencies freely admit that they’re inundated with data – with the challenge growing near exponentially. Every day more data collection technology comes online, and more social media & web sites are created, adding to the vast data silos of information. Staying abreast of this sea of information requires teams of highly trained data Analysts. However, data is created at such a rate that no entity will claim its Analyst teams are fully able to ingest all data, leading to sub-optimal decision making.

This is where Oxford Dynamics’ AVIS technology comes in. “AVIS is a highly modular scalable software platform designed to ingest both real-time and archive data. It allows complex data interrogation, comparison and summaries to be achieved in seconds via very human-like conversations”, explains OD co-founder and Director, Dr Eddie Jackson.

“In simple terms, you can think of AVIS as a smart combination of a searching algorithm like google search and a large language model, such as ChatGPT. However, these types of technologies suffer from inherent, intractable challenges such as lack of explainability and trustworthiness, together with inability to scale to Enterprise level – and that’s where AVIS comes in”.

UK SMEs are seen as a vital resource capability for the MOD, allowing some the of most innovative ideas and technologies to be rapidly developed.

“AI is seen as a strategically important capability for the UK. We need to be at the forefront of this technology, both in understanding it and applying it to solve real-world pressing challenges. By offering such framework contracts to some of our most promising indigenous start-ups, we’re well placed to be early-adopters and shapers of such critical technologies. We are proud as Defence Digital Commercial and Commercial X to support SMEs, and bring innovation to the Ministry of Defence. Oxford Dynamics is a brilliant example of that innovation, and this EA Lite represents a step forward in providing SMEs a platform within Defence, and spurring pace and creative AI solutions”, said Defence Digital Commercial & Commercial X, Ministry of Defence.

The Enterprise agreement provides an expedient route for the UK MoD organisations to work with Oxford Dynamics.

Government customers, and those in highly regulated sectors such as insurance, pharmaceutical and banking, often require offline solutions given the sensitivity of their data. “We’ve designed AVIS to work in a completely offline containerised format but also in the cloud or in a hybrid format”, explained Jackson.

“This flexibility, and our teams’ ability to rapidly develop pre-processing Modules, means we’re well-placed to deliver a highly efficient system able to process a wide range of complex data. Even with a document, like a pdf, there’s a wide range of embedded data that needs to be extracted.

Aside from the text itself, data can often appear in tables, graphs, photographs and images”.

“AVIS is not designed to replace people -it’s a tool designed to do the heavy-lifting of data processing, freeing up an Analyst to focus on critical, high-value decision making. AI tools are not at the point where we can trust them explicitly”, explained company’s second co-founder, Shefali Sharma.

“They can, however, significantly exceed the cognitive abilities of a human, so it’s about applying such technology in a smart way, freeing up humans to focus on decision making whilst staying firmly in control with an ability to verify everything the AI system is telling them”.

Oxford Dynamics now has the task of bringing various elements of the MoD and central government to table to access its novel generative AI technology. But based on the response received so far, and the numerous problem statements already being presented to the OD team, the company is confident its UK developed technology is on a solid trajectory to success at home – and beyond.

Image: Co-founders Shefali Sharma (L) and Eddie Jackson (R) in front of the servers being used for AVIS processing to support strategic government decision making.

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