Building an AI strategy as a space organization is both simpler and more difficult than you might expect. In the newest episode of Tech Talks, Kevin Bell talks with Aerospace technical fellow and AI expert Shawn Sloan about how we're integrating the buzzy technology.

The most obvious question is how a broad space organization like Aerospace gets into the AI world at all. What's the strategy?

"We're not going to out-AI the AI companies, but we can out-space everybody else," said Sloan. "Our application of AI in this domain leans into our strengths."

Aerospace's AI strategy, in fact, explicitly predicts that "space subject matter experts using AI will replace subject matter experts that don't." It sounds like a bit of a dire prediction, but it really isn't, Sloan explained.

The latest advances in AI make it easier to use, not harder, he said. "This all makes these tools way more approachable. It also amplifies our people. if we amplify our people we can get more results, faster," he said.

"The SMEs using computers certainly replaced the ones that didn't," Sloan pointed out. "There's a threat too - if we don't embrace these things, and everybody around us embraces them, what happens to Aerospace?"

Bell noted that asking AI to do a trivial or low-intensity task like writing copy is lower stakes than, say, putting AI to work doing mission-critical tasks on a one-of-a-kind satellite. How can we rely on unproven AI for those things? The answer is to do the work to prove the AI works in the first place — something Aerospace is well suited to do.

"We've been doing mission assurance our entire existence," said Sloan. So we just have to look at it through the same lens as we did before, but now it's, how do I know these AI systems are going to behave correctly? There's huge advancements in explainability, but there's also a need from industry, from our customers, in developing a trusted AI framework to help verirfy and validate that the results out of an AI agent are to be trusted."

You can watch the full Tech Talk here or above.