Peraton’s Tom Afferton on setting guardrails for AI-driven cyber operations

Peraton has secured a new award to support the U.S. Army’s Regional Cyber Center-Europe, extending a nearly two-decade partnership, said Tom Afferton, president of the company’s cyber and intelligence sector. “That award extends a nearly two-decade-long partnership and allows our team in Germany to continue supporting defensive cyber operations across Europe and Africa,” he said. “That work complements our support to U.S. Army Cyber Command, or ARCYBER, at Fort Gordon, as well as our support to the Network Enterprise Technology Command’s Global Cyber Center at Fort Huachuca, which we took on last fall. Through these programs, we’re enabling full-spectrum cyber operations, defending Army networks across the globe and helping deliver information advantage to Army commanders at multiple echelons.”

Afferton said the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence is reshaping cyber defense priorities. He pointed to “the demonstration of sophisticated capabilities by AI platforms to identify cyber vulnerabilities at unprecedented speed and scale,” adding that “AI automation can certainly help; however, complex operations left unchecked can have unintended consequences, and AI itself introduces a new attack surface for adversaries.” Peraton is focused on “establishing guardrails for using AI for automation,” he said, citing lower-risk actions such as blocking IPs of known bad actors as candidates for automation, while higher-consequence tasks demand human oversight. “Having AI auto-generate code to remediate a chip-level zero-day exploit may be an action you want a human to validate before launching,” he said. “All of that points to incorporating risk management into AI-enabled cyber automation platforms. Our end goal remains to enhance people’s abilities to make better decisions, including deciding what actions can be automated by AI — not to replace people, but to make them more effective.”

On government adoption of AI, Afferton said momentum is building but practical hurdles remain. “There are tremendous opportunities with AI-enabled automation. The pace of adoption varies across agencies, but all of our customers are moving out in some capacity,” he said, noting the Army’s Task Force Lexington push on agentic AI use cases in cyber operations. He cited gaps in data quality and tool access across classification levels as constraints, and emphasized workforce readiness: “The common denominator I hear most cited by customers as a hurdle to AI adoption is people.” Peraton has deployed agentic AI platforms “now commercially available and in production with government users,” and his team uses the platform daily. “We found that embedding tutorial capabilities within the AI platform creates an environment for progressive learning; it takes users from basic chatbot prompters to AI orchestrators,” he said. “The key is to show how people can engage with the platform themselves and achieve immediate value, drawing them into further self-driven learning.” He said the approach has delivered efficiencies in internal functions such as contract management and media relations, and in missions including cyber operations, digital forensics and intelligence analysis.

Afferton described a fast-changing threat environment and growing public-private collaboration. “A common theme is increased collaboration across industry and government,” he said. “For example, one of the frontier model companies just posted a call to action urging leading companies and government to increase efforts to build secure technology and get it into the hands of operators. Peraton is supportive of these efforts and directly involved across military, intelligence, civilian and critical infrastructure environments.” While acknowledging concerns about agentic AI being used to mount complex attacks, he underscored resilience and public trust: “We absolutely must focus on the nuts and bolts of securing critical systems and making sure they’re resilient, so the people who use those systems know they’ll work when they need them.” He warned that “The use of influence operations by our adversaries to shape public behavior is a dimension of the cyber threat that I don’t think we give enough attention to,” adding, “Recent advisories emphasized that our adversaries are attempting to penetrate critical infrastructure systems with the goal of creating U.S. homeland distractions during military operations elsewhere in the world.” He said Peraton’s information operations capabilities, including its IRIS agentic AI platform, “can likewise be deployed to defend against cyber-related influence campaigns to complement traditional cyber defense.”

Afferton also discussed the expansion of his remit. “We’ve built an expanded line of business at Peraton to serve cyber, law enforcement and intelligence customers, mirroring the interagency collaboration taking place across government,” he said. “While I can’t go into too much detail, I’ll say that I now support customers on both sides of the Potomac River.” A key priority is making intelligence more actionable by integrating it with operations. “We’re approaching that by driving tighter integration between intelligence and operations through cross-functional teams that include intelligence analysts, operators and technologists,” he said. “Technologists serve dual roles, providing subject matter expertise on some of the content being gathered as well as quickly turning around capabilities necessary to collect and process intelligence, securely and at scale.”