Developing and engineering a military jet can take many years, sometimes even more than a decade — thousands of components, systems, and so on have to be planned and designed involving many different contractors and businesses.

This process is highly costly, and there’s a risk of military aircraft coming to the market when the threat environment has already changed and other capabilities are now in demand. Making this process quicker and cheaper would be great, and that’s where AI first comes into play.

Military aircraft companies, such as Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT), use AI for tasks such as digital twinning, simulating components and entire jets, analyzing test data, and so on, in order to get high-end jets to the market faster and quicker.  

AI is used way beyond the R&D phase. AI is also deployed in military aircraft themselves, e.g. for support systems, such as threat detection: AI tools can scan sensor data for potential threats, such as incoming missiles, radar locks, and so on.

In some cases, AI can then (semi-)automatically decide on countermeasures, such as radar jamming. Likewise, Artificial Intelligence systems can help with targeting, managing weapon systems, guiding smart weapons, and so on, making military jets more efficient and giving the human pilots more time to focus on other tasks if needed.

There have even been trials where aircraft have been handled by a human pilot/AI pilot team, such as the flight of a U2 reconnaissance aircraft that was co-piloted by an AI system called ARTUµ.

In the future, teams of manned and unmanned jets will work together.

In (human) pilot training, AI plays a role as well. AI algorithms can adapt to how a pilot is doing, allowing systems to automatically adjust to the pilot’s strengths and weaknesses, helping pilots improve where it is most necessary, and so on. Training scenarios can be more advanced and realistic thanks to the use of Artificial Intelligence, making pilots more capable, all else equal.

Finding the Big Winners Now

Military aircraft manufacturers, such as LMT or General Dynamics (GD) deploy AI across their end products and during the R&D and engineering phases, but they aren’t AI-first companies.

For investors that want a more pronounced focus on AI, tech companies that power the AI trend in the military aircraft industry from “behind the scenes” could thus be of interest: Generative AI models that are used in R&D often are trained on NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) chips, for example, while data center and AI infrastructure companies, like Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL), also play an important role.

In the jets themselves, all kinds of sensors have to collect data that has to be transferred and processed for AI tools, like non-human copilots, to work, which is where semiconductor companies, like Texas Instruments (NASDAQ: TXN), benefit.

Investors can also choose among our top Artificial Intelligence picks to benefit from increased AI usage across many different industries and general Artificial Intelligence growth.