Comand AI embed in the UK defence ahead of DSEI 2025
The pan-European start-up Comand AI is expanding its footprint in London after its flagship platform, Prevail, hit the ground running on the continent with the French Army, German Bundeswehr, and with another ongoing project in Ukraine.
It is a natural next step for an organisation bringing generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) to military planning – a priority enshrined in the UK’s Strategic Defence Review, in which the trio of authors recommended that autonomy complement the ‘heavy metal’ of tanks and artillery.
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Paul Billings, vice president of the emerging UK entity, delivered an exclusive demo of Prevail for Army Technology at its office in London ahead of the leading UK defence exhibition, DSEI, where the start-up will dwell within the French pavillion, having been founded in Paris by defence expert Loïc Mougeolle just two years ago.
Ultimately, Prevail is a GenAI platform composed of two integrated components: Plans and Lessons. Together, they speed up and inform tactical decisions, allowing command and control (C2) to act faster in the mission planning stage, creating a smoother tempo on the battlefield with more time to focus on other military actions.
Prevail: Plans
Prevail processes the receipt of orders brief after which the GenAI tool helps personnel analyse missions, evaluate terrain, assess threats, and generate viable courses of action.
The tool utilises data from open street maps and low latency satellite pictures. This could extend to data gathered from disaggregated sensor nodes on the ground but this depends on user requirements. In the end, the platform allows decision-makers to wargame options under different criteria, such as logistics, flexibility, or C2.
Comand AI say this brings a fourfold increase in analysis and scenario development speed.
“This work would normally be done in 2025 with a sheet of plastic over a map [jotted by] humans with felt tip pens,” Billings said as he parsed through an AI-generated timeline of overlapping tactical actions among different military units for a fictional scenario across the complex, forested terrain south of the city of Chornobyl.
The manual methods of mission planning “would take an entire staff of 12 [or] 15 people, [around] 30 minutes, and we’ve just done it in three minutes,” he reckoned.
Prevail: Lessons
Meanwhile, the ‘lessons’ element allows the Armed Forces to draw insights from distinct data sets – missions, academia, and doctrine – into a coherent brief. The lessonsautomatically feed relevant insights into the Plans section, closing an enduring gap between operations and lessons learned.
“You can’t take six months in learning lessons because the technology would be more abundant. You’ve missed two or three iterations by the time you get back to it,” Billings considered, “so how do you draw lessons?”
In this instance, Prevail consumed information given in interviews with Vietnam War veterans.
“We’ll pick a document,” Billings said, guiding through the Lessons interface. “If you go into it, you see it has generated lessons and observations. Observations create lessons, and then lessons create trends, and then you go from there.”
Currently, Comand AI are working with the French Army using the Lessons tool, and the start-up sped up the process from up to four months to just two weeks while still maintaining a large degree of human interaction. Billings noted the platform saved around 80% of the typical timeframe.
“You can take articles, academia, but also, and more pertinent to that, rapid lesson cycles, post operational reports, post operational insights, post exercise reports, interviews from the battlefield, drop them in.”
Tapping into UK defence, DSEI 2025
Alongside their new office in London, Comand AI plan to inject more than £35m ($47.5bn) in British defence over the next five years. This ambition builds on the €12m ($14m) raised in pre-seed and seed funds.
The Anglo-French company have hired more British engineers which will no doubt feed into UK government requirements for a strong domestic footprint.
Besides, Comand AI have a significant advantage as a software supplier. Hardware suppliers “have to suddenly scale up to produce 250,000 [units] in three months, which is a problem that governments can have in the way it establishes hardware contracts,” Billings mentioned.
DSEI 2025 will take place at the London Excel between 9-12 September. You can find out more information about the exhibition here.
