I led the Army’s digital transformation programme – here’s what I learned about AI

At one stage in Stefan Crossfield CMgr FCMI’s 35-year British Army career, he was the commanding officer of a battalion in Afghanistan, responsible for around 1,000 people and £12.5bn of stock and assets. If that sounds like a lot, he’d soon shoulder more. Having risen to the rank of brigadier, Stefan spent his final five years of service spearheading the Army’s sweeping digital transformation programme, to prepare the Army for a new era of warfare – first as its head of information exploitation, later as its chief digital and data officer and principal AI officer.

From battlefield command to digital transformation

“Seven or eight years ago, the military realised the way war is fought was changing,” says Stefan, explaining his posting. “Cyberspace was becoming a key battlefield. Digital data is now an asset, whether to drive better decisions or undermine the enemy, through attacking their systems or using false news to manipulate the narrative and distort their sense of reality. And with data and open-source AI tools now so available, the adoption has accelerated rapidly.”

To illustrate his point, Stefan highlights how both parties in the war in Ukraine have opted to leave the mobile phone network at the front line intact, because data is strategically vital. He adds how some nations now train entire battalions of soldiers to fight in cyberspace. And he flags how London’s traffic lights are all run by a single digital platform. 

Acknowledging the complexity and interdependency of modern technology and warfare, Stefan’s superiors took the unusual move of putting him on to an MBA, on a full-time external placement programme. There, he studied technology and innovation. He says it was the hardest he’d ever worked – in part because of the pressure from his brigade commander in Afghanistan to excel, given such an exceptional opportunity. Stefan gained a distinction.

Why management matters as much as leadership

The other facet of Stefan’s learning journey was management. He explains how, due to the nature of its role, the Army’s officer training tends to focus on leadership. Management often comes second.

Around the year 2000, Stefan found himself in a meeting room near London’s Savoy Hotel, facing another tough adversary: an unnamed figure from the Ministry of Defence (MOD), who was there to help assess his competency for Chartered Manager status. CMI was about to start accrediting the military’s senior non-commissioned officer courses and Stefan was a willing guinea pig.