Artificial Intelligence (AI) has transformed warfare and the Indian Air Force is looking to harness the power of AI for a wide range of applications such as training and threat monitoring Air Chief Marshal RKS Bhadauria said on Monday. Additionally, the Air Force is looking to deploy AI in areas of data and intelligence fusion, maintenance as well as in its decision support system.

"These are huge areas of focus for our immediate future," he said at a FICCI seminar on the use of AI for air warriors. The Air Chief Marshal then appealed to the industries to explore newer applications of AI in the military. "Smart technologies like AI have the potential to totally change the way we train and fight future wars. We are living through some interesting times," he said.

"It is the right time for all of us, the military operators, the industry, the think-tanks and all the AI specialists for creating next-generation AI enablers for the air war," the IAF chief said. 

He also mentioned that threat levels and perception differ according to nations and technological priorities would differ with regards to this. "We have already embarked on an AI journey and having gone through some of the important automation projects in the recent past, we have started testing AI and AI-based applications on some projects which are in different stages," he added.

However, Air Chief Marshal Bhadauria confessed that AI is still at its nascent stage in the military and there is a long way before autonomous missions can be undertaken with technological support. "However, there is a need to address some questions to this effect- whether algorithms can be trained to effectively execute mission planning behaviours in unpredictable scenarios; can machines be taught combat strategies; can sufficiently generalised representations be built to capture the richness of the planning problem itself across the threat matrix," he said.

"The answer to these questions will help us firm up our requirement specifications that will essentially be a starting document vis-a-vis the expected outcomes. If we tend to utilise AI heavily in combat aviation, we may need to redefine or even abandon certain traditional principles," he added.