Airbus Defence and Space won a strategic contract from the French Defence Procurement Agency. The deal is worth up to €50 million. The agreement aims to add advanced AI features to many systems used by the French armed forces. This includes weapons, information, communication, and cybersecurity platforms.
Under this contract, which also encompasses the systems supplied by Airbus Helicopters, Airbus teams up with the Ministerial Agency for Defence AI, AMIAD, created in May 2024, to provide AI solutions that enhance national technological sovereignty and operational effectiveness.
The initiative forms part of France’s wider defense AI strategy designed to reduce dependency on foreign technologies and scale the use of AI in military operations.
Also Read: BAE Systems Introduces OneArc to Transform Battlespace
Targeted Improvements and Future Applications
The first phase of implementation will modernize the nation’s maritime surveillance system, Spationav, by embedding AI tools in it that can automatically fuse data from satellite sensors and other sources of surveillance.
Beyond maritime surveillance, Airbus and its partners will investigate further AI use cases, notably for:
• Intelligence processing
• Cybersecurity reinforcement
• Real-time optimisation of military telecommunications networks.
Dynamic AI integration is expected to enhance the speed of decision-making, reduce manual workload across complex systems, and allow data handling at scales that are beyond human capacity. It will also address key challenges related to data storage, archiving, and structuring in support of future AI workloads.
Advancing Defence Through AI
With the modern battle environment generating enormous volumes of data from satellites, radars, drones, mobile devices, and open-source channels, AI technologies have become indispensible for rapid processing and operational insight. In such a scenario, Airbus‘ integration of AI aims at real-time situational awareness enhancement and high-performance digital defence through streamlining data analysis and automating key tasks.