A Battlefield AI Company Says It’s One of the Good Guys
On the screen in front of me is a mountain range. Moving toward my troops from the top-right corner is an ominous yellow dot. I suspect it’s an enemy drone, but it could be a bird or a civilian aircraft, so I ask my long-range camera to home in on it. Within seconds, it returns a snapshot of a wide-winged military drone. The incoming dot turns from yellow to red, signifying a threat.
This might sound like a video game, but it’s not. This is technology designed to be used by real militaries. And it is the first time defense-tech company Helsing AI has shown a journalist what the software it is selling actually looks like. Helsing’s flagship system absorbs huge amounts of data generated by the sensors (electro-optical, infrared, sonar) and weapons systems (fighter jets, drones, helicopters) used in modern warfare. Algorithms then distill that information into a video-game-style visualization to show how events are unfolding in real time on the battlefield. What I’m looking at is a simulation of what I would see if I worked for a military that used Helsing’s system.
Torsten Reil, 49, is one of the company’s two CEOs. With a background in gaming—he previously founded development studio NaturalMotion—Reil is preoccupied with the user experience and making the platform intuitive for its military clientele. Then there’s co-CEO Gundbert Scherf, 41, a former special adviser to Germany’s military of defense, who talks fluently about how European militaries work and what he feels they need to do to modernize. And finally there’s the in-house AI expert and chief product officer, 31-year-old Niklas Köhler, the youngest of the three. Köhler was using machine learning to solve medical problems when he started to be approached by figures in the defense sector—prompting him to change direction. “Applications like detecting drones are, in terms of methods, not so dissimilar from how you would find cancer in large CT scans,” he says.
