"One of our primary drivers is that our adversaries were investing heavily, and so there is the pressure to keep ahead of and do that safely," Jay Harless, director of human development at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, said Tuesday at the Workday Federal Forum presented by Scoop News Group.
NGA's timeline: a three-to-five-year workforce and IT transformation
The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) has set a multi-year timetable to reshape both its technical backbone and its workforce for an AI-enabled future. Sasha Muth, NGA’s deputy director of human development, described the initiative as a three-to-five-year effort: this year will be devoted largely to "putting structural things in place" to govern when and how analysts will use AI, with an upcoming three-year strategic plan centered on change management, professional development and updated job skills. The agency also began staffing AI leadership in 2024, when it hired its first Chief AI Officer.
Moving fast, "safely": agentic AI inside secure boundaries
Agency leaders are explicit about the tension they face: moving quickly to keep pace with what they characterize as an international AI arms race, while avoiding changes that could disrupt proven intelligence methods. Harless said NGA and other elements of the intelligence community are working toward systems that include agentic AI capable of accelerating decision-making "within secure boundaries." That approach is meant to strike a balance — accelerating analysis where possible, but constraining automation where legal, ethical, or operational risks are present.
Workforce anxiety and change management
Muth acknowledged an internal struggle: persuading rank-and-file employees that AI will augment their work rather than replace it. She warned of a central fear inside the agency: "we‘re going to lose a lot of our expertise" over the five-year transition if functions are automated without concurrently modernizing job requirements. Muth said there is "a lot of fear...that their job is going away, that they won’t have a job," and framed workforce evolution — including reassessing qualifications for entry-level positions — as a central pillar of NGA’s upcoming strategy.
Technical safeguards: validation, bias monitoring, and accountability
Harless outlined concrete engineering and governance steps NGA plans to take to reduce risk as it introduces more capable AI tools. The agency is building new IT infrastructure, creating validation protocols, monitoring for bias or "rogue behavior," and putting accountability mechanisms in place. He described a deliberate process of distinguishing three categories of work: what should be automated, what should be augmented, and what should remain purely human-operated because some functions will always require human control.
What this means for analysts, NGA leaders, and adversaries
- Analysts and rank-and-file employees: Expect structural changes to tools, job descriptions and entry-level qualifications over the next several years. NGA leaders are explicitly focused on professional development to reduce fear and retain expertise during automation.
- NGA leadership and human development officials: Their priorities are change management and workforce transformation alongside technical deployments — translating agentic AI concepts into validated systems constrained by accountability and bias monitoring.
- Adversarial countries like Russia and China: Harless placed these nations in the calculus for tempo, saying adversaries' heavy investment in AI is a primary driver of NGA’s push to "keep ahead of and do that safely."
The agency’s stated path is methodical: hire AI leadership, spend a year building governance and infrastructure, and execute a multi-year plan to update roles and retrain personnel. That roadmap answers one set of questions — how NGA intends to move fast with oversight — while leaving another unresolved: whether the agency can modernize job requirements and sustain institutional expertise at the same pace it automates tasks. The next visible milestone will be the release and initial implementation of the three-year strategic plan Muth referenced; until then, the agency’s task will be to reduce workforce fear even as it races to remain competitive in a world where adversaries are investing heavily in AI.
