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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Pending accreditation, the chatbot will be deployed to U.S. Indo-Pacific Command and allow users to experiment with genAI models on the Secure Internet Protocol Router (SIPRNet), Jeff Marshall, director of DISA’s Hosting and Compute Center, said during a webinar broadcast Tuesday by Federal News Network. The platform is currently in the accreditation stage and is expected to open up “within the next month or so,” Marshall noted.

The capability was developed in close collaboration with the Air Force Research Lab, which launched its own experimental generative AI chatbot for the Department of the Air Force on unclassified networks — dubbed NIPRGPT — last year. Similar to AFRL’s program, AFRL and DISA are using the effort to evaluate and expedite delivery of commercial AI tools, but the agency’s initiative will be in classified realms, Marshall said.

“We’re not trying to deploy this on our own. We’re not trying to make it a production system. This is [a research-and-development] system that we’re using for Indo-Pacom in order to test large language models overseas,” he said.

Across the Pentagon, organizations have looked to capitalize on commercial large language models and other artificial intelligence capabilities. Although there have been various efforts over the last few years — ranging from task forces to experimental platforms — the department is still learning how the technology can be best used to improve back-office and tactical operations.

Marshall noted that DISA’s SIPR-based LLM will largely help “facilitate that demand signal of, what does an Indo-Pacom commander need and want to utilize AI for? And then, how do we then shape that to what industry can actually provide for us at scale?”

DISA plans to host the chatbot on one of the two Joint Operational Edge (JOE) cloud environments it has deployed to the Pacific. Initiated in 2023, the JOE cloud effort seeks to stand up commercial cloud environments at the agency’s overseas data centers, allowing DISA to place cloud-native applications in locations outside of the continental United States. Along with JOE, the agency is also providing its private cloud capability known as Stratus to areas overseas.

To date, DISA has put two JOE cloud nodes at Indo-Pacom and one at U.S. European Command, and will soon deploy another node in Southwest Asia, Marshall said.

Moving forward, DISA is looking to potentially provide additional JOE cloud environments in Europe in order to support operations for U.S. Africa Command, which is headquartered in Germany. But Marshall emphasized the agency is doing so while balancing demand signals with available resources.

“Let’s don’t just throw it all out there one time and hope that it sticks to the wall,” he said. “We’re taking in the demand signal, we’re making sure that there is a valid need that supports us doing the deployment and then, of course, there’s a budget to cover it.”

Updated on March 26, 2025, at 10:35 AM: This story has been updated to clarify AFRL’s role in the new chatbot initiative and to remove “acting” from Jeff Marshall’s job title.

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The capability, dubbed NIPRGPT because it’s intended to be used on the Non-classified Internet Protocol Router Network (NIPRNet), was released in June by the Air Force chief information officer and the Air Force Research Laboratory. It’s available to personnel with a Defense Department Common Access Card, and officials are seeking feedback from users that could inform future investments and applications for generative AI tools.

“It is, at its heart, a research experiment, right? We do not think that NIPRGPT is going to be the tool that goes forward. We really actually hope that as these commercial tools come online, they vastly surpass the capabilities of NIPRGPT. But what we’ve learned so far is that people are really excited to use this, and we provide a space in the NIPRGPT for them to use that in a space that they feel safe — I would call it like a safe space, almost — so that when we do get those commercial tools, they know what they’re doing, they don’t have a learning curve to get through,” Amanda Bullock, the artificial intelligence lead at AFRL, told DefenseScoop Thursday at the GovCIO Media & Research AI Summit.

There are three main use cases that service members are employing it for, so far: summarization of documents, drafting of documents and coding assistance.

The coding assistance capability isn’t just helping computer scientists and engineers, but also pilots and other personnel, she noted.

“We’re also finding out that they, as they get more and more excited about these tools, they want better and better features. And you know, that’s where we kind of meet with them and we say, ‘Look, this is not what you need. What you need is one of our commercial partner tools. What you need already exists out there from this small business.’ And so really learning that and talking to people when they get really excited and they’re like, ‘I want my own deployment of NIPRGPT.’ And we’re like, ‘Oh, do we really?’” Bullock said.

The experiments are also highlighting shortfalls in compute.

“We’re also learning the compute, right? The compute is not there. Unfortunately, our friends up on the hill have not planned for this type of technology … at the rapid pace that it’s come. And so we didn’t have the type of compute we needed in our HPCs. We didn’t have the type of compute that we needed in our commercial vendors. And so [we’re] having to pivot very quickly and realize that we need a modular architecture to be able to shift that and offer a hybrid approach to it,” Bullock said.

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Davenport will take over responsibilities from Chandra Donelson, who has been the DAF’s acting CDAO since April while also maintaining her role as the Space Force’s data and AI officer. Prior to that, Eileen Vidrine served as the DAF CDAO from January 2023 until her retirement earlier this year in March.

In a LinkedIn post announcing her appointment, the Department of the Air Force’s Chief Information Office said Davenport’s “expertise driving innovation and managing complex programs will be instrumental in shaping the future of Data and AI for the Air Force and the Space Force.”

Davenport has over three decades of experience working in government, including several roles at the National Reconnaissance Office and the Air Force. Most recently, she was the senior advisor for defense innovation at the Secretary of the Air Force’s office for concepts development and management.

As CDAO for both the Air and Space Forces, Davenport is responsible for ensuring the department is “AI-ready” by 2025 and “AI-competitive” by 2027, as well as promoting the ethical use of artificial intelligence and related technologies. She will also be tasked with developing and implementing enterprise data management, analytics and digital transformation strategies that will improve the DAF’s performance initiatives.

Across the Pentagon, the military services and department offices are looking to harness AI for a range of activities — from day-to-day tasks to tactical operations. Specifically, the Department of the Air Force CIO has recently made a number of new AI-enabled tools available to personnel for experimentation through its DAF AI Launch Point and AI Exchange App Store. 

Among those tools is NIPRGPT — a generative AI chatbot hosted on the Non-classified Internet Protocol Router Network (NIPRNet). Released in June in collaboration with the Air Force Research Laboratory, the experimental platform allows officials to test different large language models and learn how they can be used in real-world scenarios.

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The online tool, dubbed CLARA, is designed to increase visibility and overall understanding of the department’s AI-related initiatives by serving as a centralized repository that provides information, progress and potential collaboration opportunities on projects, the DAF CIO noted Monday in a post on LinkedIn. The goal is to ensure stakeholders across the department stay informed and aligned in regards to these types of technologies.

“Every warfighter deserves clarity on the tools and capabilities at their disposal,” Acting DAF Chief Data and AI Officer Chandra Donelson said in a statement. “Transparent access to our resources ensures everyone is more equipped and ready to excel in any mission.”

Much like the rest of the Pentagon, the Department of the Air Force has been exploring how to leverage advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities for the Air and Space Forces. The DAF has been experimenting with new technologies and launched pilot efforts focusing on how AI can assist both services — ranging from day-to-day tasks to tactical operations.

With a number of programs underway, CLARA will be used to monitor progress, spending and potential duplicative initiatives, DAF CIO Venice Goodwine said Monday during a keynote speech at the annual Department of the Air Force Information Technology and Cyberpower conference.

“One of the things Congress has levied upon us is we must be able to have an AI inventory so we can report how much money we’re spending on AI,” Goodwine said. “But importantly, how are we tracking the time back on mission for our airmen and guardians? CLARA is a way in which we’re going to do that.”

In April, officials set up a DAF AI Launch Point to act as a “one-stop shop” for all of the department’s emerging artificial intelligence capabilities, Goodwine said. The website includes information on policies, strategy, training and education, as well as the AI Exchange App Store where airmen and guardians can begin experimenting with AI-enabled technologies.

Among those new tools is NIPRGPT 1.0 — a generative AI chatbot hosted on the Non-classified Internet Protocol Router Network (NIPRNet). Released in June in collaboration with the Air Force Research Laboratory, the experimental platform allows the DAF to test different large language models and learn how they can be used in real-world scenarios.

NIPRGPT 1.0 has enabled experimentation with some open-source large language models, such as Meta’s Llama family of LLMs and Mistral AI, Goodwine noted.

Under what is being called NIPRGPT 1.0+, the department is looking to incorporate a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) model to combine large language models with the department’s internal data.

“What we want to show you which model is best for which use case,” Goodwine said.

Along with NIPRGPT, the department’s AI Exchange platform also includes redForce AI — a DevOps platform that supports rapid artificial intelligence capability development for warfighters — and the Mission-Driven Autonomous Collaborative Heterogeneous Intelligent Network Architecture (MACHINA), which is part of the Space Force’s space domain awareness network architecture. 

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