In 2023, Bonnell was tapped to serve as AFRL’s first-ever chief information officer and director of the laboratory’s Digital Capabilities Directorate, where she led the lab’s information technology strategy and overall modernization efforts. According to a Tuesday post on LinkedIn, Bonnell is now working at OpenAI as a partnership manager, a position she took on in March.

“The role [at AFRL] was truly one in a lifetime — serving the national security mission alongside some of the most brilliant scientists, engineers, and digital visionaries in the country,” Bonnell wrote. “From cybersecurity to networks and infrastructure, from enterprise service design to pushing the frontiers of AI, I couldn’t be more proud of what we built together—or more confident in the team carrying the mission forward.”

While at AFRL, Bonnell was at the forefront of the lab’s push to develop new artificial intelligence capabilities for warfighters. She was instrumental in launching the Air Force’s experimental generative AI chatbot known as NIPRGPT — a model that has since been scaled to other organizations across the Defense Department such as the Defense Information Systems Agency.

“Helping to launch one of the first human-machine teaming research platforms in DoD, built with open-source tools and volunteer effort, was a career highlight. So was advancing AI adoption across the force, making the theoretical practical,” Bonnell wrote.

Before joining AFRL, Bonnell was Google Public Sector’s emerging tech “evangelist,” where she helped the Defense Department and other federal agencies adopt new capabilities such as cloud, AI and zero-trust cybersecurity strategies.

As she returns to the private sector, she expects to dive deeper into artificial intelligence capabilities and explore how the technology can contribute to public service, she said on LinkedIn.

At OpenAI, Bonnell will “support extraordinary public sector organizations like the U.S. National Labs to research and apply frontier current and future AI models to the grand challenges of research, science, innovation, and national security,” she wrote.

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AFRL stood up an environment called the “LabVerse” around the time it created a new Digital Capabilities Directorate in March 2023.

“LabVerse is one of the ways, in essence, how we bring this information flow together more dynamically. So whether that is things from AI sandboxes, being able to let people play kind of that DevSecOps initial stage, all the way to being able to look at security as a service,” Alexis Bonnell, CIO and leader of the Digital Capabilities Directorate, told DefenseScoop Thursday at the GovCIO Media & Research AI Summit.

One “thing that I’m really excited about when we think about the types of experiments we’re doing in LabVerse is also things like looking at AI for system modernization. And I will tell you … the AI is actually very good at breaking down, for lack of a better term, itself. And so we’ve been able to take a lot of systems that might be in COBOL or Fortran, and you know, quite frankly, we don’t even have the talent in circulation anymore to be running these systems. So part of what we look at is not only how might the AI be able to help us go from those old system languages or programming languages to new, [but] what we didn’t expect is that the AI is also really good at showing us things like … this system has a lot of complex code, this system simple code,” Bonnell said. “We are seeing where partners built things in that maybe make it harder for other partners to follow, which I don’t think we expected to be able to see as easily as we can. And so there is a lot … in this learning by doing.”

She also highlighted the Air Force Research Lab’s experimental chatbot initiative, dubbed NIPRGPT because it’s intended to be used on the Non-classified Internet Protocol Router Network (NIPRNet). The platform, released about five months ago, allows airmen, guardians, civilian employees and contractors to interact with generative artificial intelligence. Officials are seeking feedback from users that could inform future investments and applications of those types of capabilities.

At Thursday’s summit, Amanda Bullock, the artificial intelligence lead at the Air Force Research Lab, told DefenseScoop that there’s been a lot of enthusiasm about NIPRGPT. The main use cases that service members have been employing it for, so far, are summarization of documents, drafting of documents and coding assistance.

However, Bonnell noted that officials are trying to serve as honest brokers for advising people about artificial intelligence capabilities.

“One of the most exciting things about AFRL is we serve a little bit as like a third-party agnostic consultant, if you will. And especially in the area of AI, we have so many people coming to us saying, ‘Is this thing good for AI?’ And sometimes the answer is ‘no,’” Bonnell said.

“We have, you know, a team that can actually add some AI into your system. But also with Amanda’s team, she’s looking at all of the commercial tools,” Bonnell noted. “And so LabVerse also includes the ability to understand, if you have this use case, you know, this small business already solved that right, or this large company already has an app for that. We call it wormholing the OODA Loop — meaning taking someone from, you know, an observation state to an end state.”

AFRL aims to be flexible with the LabVerse as warfighters’ needs evolve.

“One of the things we’re trying to do with LabVerse is to make sure that it is flexible to meet the demands we’re getting. So as an example, you know, one of the recent questions was: Can we do a decision, you know, analytics that kind of goes through a lot of the same education process … as many of our airmen or guardians, and then have kind of a battle buddy, right, informationally? So that is not a question that we got asked a year ago. And so I think what we’re trying to do is to make sure that LabVerse, instead of being a time capsule, that functions with humility to say we don’t even know what’s coming two weeks from now, six months from now — so how do we make it as adaptable a spinal cord, if you will, to be able to meet those new requests, those moments? And then, quite frankly, really making sure that we are humble enough and smart enough to know that, if that’s not our jam, or if someone else has already solved that, to actually be the first people to say, ‘Don’t reinvent that. Don’t do that. You know, find that over there,'” Bonnell said.

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Launched by the Air Force chief information officer and the Air Force Research Laboratory on Monday, the so-called NIPRGPT platform will allow airmen, guardians, civilian employees and contractors to interact with a chatbot on the Non-classified Internet Protocol Router Network (NIPRNet).

The GenAI-powered platform is not a final product for users, but rather a way for the department to experiment with generative AI tech in real-world scenarios as it continues to explore the capability’s potential, according to a press release.

“Technology is learned by doing,” Chandra Donelson, the DAF’s acting chief data and artificial intelligence officer, said in a statement. “As our warfighters, who are closest to the problems, are learning the technology, we are leveraging their insight to inform future policy, acquisition and investment solutions.”

According to the department, users can have human-like conversations with NIPRGPT in order to ask queries and receive assistance on various tasks, including correspondence, background papers and code. The platform is freely available to users with a Department of Defense Common Access Card, and interactions between the chatbot and human users occur in a secure environment.

As an experimental platform, the Air Force plans to focus on various key metrics of NIPRGPT’s performance — including “computational efficiency, resource utilization, security compliance” and more — in order to gauge generative AI’s “practical applications and challenges and ensure that future implementation is effective and efficient,” a DAF news release stated.

The department is encouraging users to provide feedback on NIPRGPT to help inform potential future integration of the technology. The platform will function as a “critical bridge” as the department works with the commercial sector to deploy the capabilities while navigating “intense security parameters and other processes,” Air Force Research Lab CIO Alexis Bonnel said.

“Changing how we interact with unstructured knowledge is not instant perfection; we each must learn to use the tools, query, and get the best results,” Bonnell said in a statement. “NIPRGPT will allow Airmen and Guardians to explore and build skills and familiarity as more powerful tools become available.” 

NPIRGPT is also part of AFRL’s Dark Saber software platform — a software engineering ecosystem of airmen and guardians equipped with the tools needed to develop and deploy next-generation software and operational capabilities.

Organizations across the Defense Department have been exploring how generative AI could be used to assist the military in both day-to-day and tactical operations. The technology is a subfield of artificial intelligence that uses large language models to generate content based on prompts and data they are trained on.

In 2023, the Pentagon set up Task Force Lima to assess and synchronize generative AI exploration and adoption across the department. Some large language models have been deployed for use in limited environments at DOD, such as Microsoft’s GPT-4. The Navy also launched its own AI-powered chatbot last summer, although the platform is not powered by large language models.

Meanwhile, the Department of the Air Force recently wrapped up a series of roundtables with industry and academia to explore how and where generative AI can be used for its operations. CIO Venice Goodwine said in a statement that the roundtables demonstrated that generative AI is actively growing.

“Now is the time to give our Airmen and Guardians the flexibility to develop the necessary skills in parallel,” Goodwine said. “There are multiple modernization efforts going on right now across the federal government and within the DAF to get tools in the hands of the workforce. This tool is another one of those efforts.”

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“Supporting both the Air Force and Space Force missions at AFRL is an incredible honor,” Bonnell said in a release Thursday announcing her new roles. “I believe we are entering an ‘Exponential Age,’ where speed, adaptability, and curiosity will be the key tenets to maintain adversarial advantage. I’m excited to work with the amazing scientists, researchers, business and mission leaders at AFRL to leverage technology to rapidly augment our national security.”

As the laboratory’s first-ever CIO, Bonnell will be responsible for developing and executing an information technology strategy for AFRL. Her focus will be “catalyzing the discovery, development, and integration of warfighting technologies for air, space, and cyberspace forces via digital capabilities, IT infrastructure and technological innovation across the lab’s operations and culture,” according to her bio on the organization’s website.

She will also lead AFRL’s new Digital Capabilities Directorate — a virtual “labverse” aiming to streamline the laboratory’s modernization efforts and more quickly transition adoption-ready tech to warfighters. Stood up in March, the organization is looking to leverage techniques used by commercial companies to improve AFRL’s research and business operations.

Before joining AFRL, Bonnell was Google Public Sector’s emerging tech “evangelist,” according to the release. At Google, she helped the Defense Department and other federal agencies adopt new capabilities such as cloud, artificial intelligence and zero-trust cybersecurity strategies.

Prior to Google, she was the chief innovation officer at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), where she co-founded the agency’s innovation hub known as the Global Development Lab. She also has experience working in areas of armed conflict with the United Nations.

“[Bonnell] joins AFRL at a critical moment in time, as AFRL accelerates the generation and transition of cutting-edge technologies for our warfighters,” AFRL Commander Brig. Gen. Scott Cain said in a statement. “With her visionary leadership and deep understanding of technology and how it can be harnessed to achieve mission success, she is poised to strengthen the culture of innovation and lead AFRL into a new era of digital capability.”

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