Thales announces cortAIx to speed up AI development for defence

Thales has announced the creation of cortAIx, which brings together the company’s AI capabilities in research, sensors and systems. cortAIx is the AI accelerator that will equip armed forces, aircraft manufacturers and all critical infrastructure operators with highly secure solutions to provide them with more efficient data analysis and decision support, whilst taking into account specific constraints such as cybersecurity, embeddability and frugality that are related to critical environments.

With over 600 AI experts, around 100 doctoral students in AI and a top-tier network of industry, start-up and academic partners, Thales has been a major player in trusted, transparent, explainable and ethical AI for the past decade. The company is Europe’s top patent applicant in the field of AI for critical applications, and has incorporated AI into over a hundred of its products and services.

The defence sector is undergoing major changes related to the proliferation of data on the battlefield. And it is taking advantage of new usage in the civilian world, such as personal assistants, video analysis and noise reduction.

On the back of the investments it has made in the field of AI, Thales has been incorporating AI into its critical systems for the last ten years, in order to enable its customers to gain an edge and to become more resilient in the face of a deluge of data, threats and information.

Thales Chairman and CEO Patrice Caine, said, “Our company, which is a European leader in the fields of civil and defence high-tech, is able to draw on its mastery of AI and on the assets that are its strength: its technological expertise, its knowledge of critical domains – defence and aerospace, space, cybersecurity, digital identity – and its management of constrained environments. Thales is already developing embeddable, frugal, trusted, explainable and secure end-to-end solutions, and today it is moving to the next level by acquiring major AI capabilities, that meet the security and sovereignty needs of our customers.”

On the occasion of fourth edition of the Thales Media Day, structured around AI, Thales is introducing cortAIx, the AI accelerator designed to expand the integration of AI technology into all of the company’s sectors of activity (defence, space, aerospace, cybersecurity and digital identity). cortAIx brings together:

cortAIx Lab – the most powerful integrated lab for critical AI in Europe, based in Saclay, at the heart of the European innovation ecosystem.

cortAIx Factory – Thales’s AI technology factory, designed to speed up the classification and industrialisation of AI development tools and use cases for system data. Thales already equips its systems with AI, and continues to identify new use cases to increase performance, such as, for instance, mission planning, air traffic management, and steering drones and robots. AI enables situations to be analysed and processed quicker and systems to be used more intuitively, in order to speed up decision-making and reduce operators’ mental workload.

cortAIx Sensors – this represents all the AI capabilities in the field of sensors within the company’s defence businesses. The Thales sensors (sonar, radar, radio and optronics) that incorporate AI offer hugely increased capabilities – both more precise and more efficient – in terms of sighting and identifying threats and targets, and they meet frugality requirements in terms of size, weight, power, as well as being resilient in extreme environments.