The MoD has awarded an Enterprise Agreement Lite to an Oxford-based AI start-up to improve the management and analysis of complex data
Oxford Dynamics has secured the £2 million agreement for its AVIS data management platform - the first AI Enterprise Agreement that the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has awarded. The Enterprise Agreement was awarded by Defence Digital Commercial, the organisation led by Ministry of Defence CIO Charles Forte, to secure digital technology for the armed forces, which is part of the Digital Strategy of Defence.
“AI is seen as a strategically important capability for the UK,” Defence Digital Commercial said in a statement. “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.
“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.”
Oxford Dynamics has developed AVIS to ingest real-time and archived data. The platform assesses, compares and creates summaries from these data sets. Edward Jackson, co-founder of the start-up describes the technology as: “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”.
Importantly, for the military, AVIS can work offline in a containerised technology format but can also be deployed on the cloud or in hybrid-cloud environments.
