At ClearanceJobs Connect 2026 in Reston, Virginia, two CIA leaders and an AWS partner explained how artificial intelligence, which the agency now calls “SI,” is changing intelligence work. They also described what that means for the cleared workforce.
Larry, who is moving into a new role as dean of his directorate’s university, said the shift underway is from chatting with AI to handing it tasks. Agentic tools can compress work that once took an officer weeks into hours. He prefers to measure that by “value of investment,” meaning time returned to the mission, rather than by dollars saved.
Chris, chief scientist in the CIA’s Office of Super Intelligence, said the biggest barrier isn’t computing power or better models. It’s basic AI literacy. The strongest signal that a candidate will succeed, he said, is that they already use these tools in their daily life. A GitHub portfolio still matters, but so does building a scheduling app for your kids’ ball games.
Both stressed that a human must own every outcome. The agency uses an AI governance board, brings in legal review, and trains analysts never to assume AI output is fully accurate. As agents multiply, the panelists said, identity and observability become essential. Every agent action has to be traceable to a person or system and a purpose.
For hiring, Chris noted a surge in demand for cleared forward deployed engineers. Larry warned that some new graduates claim agentic coding skills but produce weak code, so employers should validate those skills. He even floated switching the models off one day a week to make sure developers can still code on their own.
AWS’s Amber Nicholas emphasized that vendors need to understand classified environments, where a tool that needs an internet connection simply won’t work.
The panel’s closing advice was simple: get hands-on, and use AI to teach yourself AI.
