NGA and NRO “have significantly overlapping Venn diagrams,” one industry source said, and they are still trying to “sort that through.” He added, “It’s not a nice clean line.”

“If you’re looking for an area to partner with us, I highly recommend you focus on Artificial Intelligence, Automation and Augmentation — what we call AAA,” Vice Adm. Bob Sharp the industry audience at GEOINT 2019 in San Antonio today.

USDI Kari Bingen says that DoD’s mission “is hampered when we have to pay in time and money analysts and experts to manually translate data files … to makes systems and data interoperable because of proprietary data standards and formats.”

“To be quite honest most of our space systems are not the leading edge technologies,” Troy Meink, head of GEOINT at NRO, said. “We’ve not kept up in many cases with the commercial environment.”