Judicious deployment of artificial intelligence could incentivize knowledge transfer and transform productivity at U.S. embassies.

BY DANIEL CROCKER

U.S. embassies and consulates have long relied on reporting to share actionable and relevant knowledge with policymakers in Washington, D.C. It is an arduous task, requiring meetings at post with emerging leaders, activists, and officials at all levels of the host government. Diplomats work to establish trust and write detailed reports about what they’ve learned from their contacts on the ground. But the process has often fallen short, especially when it comes to the fragmentation and transfer of information and the kind of continuity over time needed for effective diplomacy and mission achievement.

U.S. national interests are not served by, for example, having a Foreign Commercial Service (FCS) diplomat, who has relationships with leading private sector executives, or a Diplomatic Security agent, with contacts in law enforcement, keep that knowledge in their heads or in agency-specific data silos. Even in a small country like Panama, where I served as head of commerce from 2010 to 2013, more than 20 agencies are represented at the U.S. embassy, creating overlap of authority and balkanized reporting in service of multiple missions. To make matters worse, as Foreign Service personnel move to new postings, as frequently as every two years, that knowledge typically leaves with them, and their replacements have to start all over again.

A judicious deployment of artificial intelligence could disrupt this cycle and, if done well, transform the productivity of U.S. embassies. With the help of AI, we can build an outcomes-based culture with adherence to tight metrics. It will not be easy. Diplomats will have to be incentivized, as they are not currently, to transfer knowledge of individuals or issues to a digital format. Also, it could be poorly implemented, simply bolted on to existing operations or not adopted at all by some agencies at post, and that would be a costly but useless exercise. But it is worth trying.

No More Business as Usual

A fully integrated AI solution is possible with today’s technology, but it is years away from implementation, simply given the cycle time of U.S. government procurement as well as user training and adoption for a globally distributed workforce. That is a feature, not a bug, for this simple reason: Proceeding deliberately will result in more mature solutions for a fully AI-integrated customer relationship management (CRM) platform from Microsoft and Salesforce, among others. I base this observation on my experience leading a procurement and global implementation of Salesforce for the U.S. Department of Commerce—a process that took more than two years and required significant executive sponsorship, specific statutory language appropriating funds, and a team of seasoned field officials and tech contractors.

How can AI be helpful in the near future? Imagine having a team of people at post who speak requisite languages with fluency, who have the bandwidth to read every article and consume all public media, and whose job it is to generate relevant reports, receive and transcribe debriefs, and flag patterns and people of interest to U.S. diplomats who cycle through posts every two years. If an AI agent can do this, it frees our diplomats from the time-honored but questionable practice of translating news articles and sending them in as reports with a snippet of commentary. It enables them to focus on what an AI agent can’t do—engage on a personal level to promote U.S. national interests and gather actionable, relevant human intelligence.

AI can already be deployed to read all public media and tag it for structured retrieval and synthesis. And since it feeds off public data, it could be implemented quickly as a pilot at a few posts. AI could also be used to derive reports, metrics, and prompts for action. Within Microsoft, such tools as CoPilot are already being deployed for writing at some U.S. government agencies (e.g., U.S. Export-Import Bank).

AI implementation would start with new standards for presence at post, established by the ambassador with support from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to insist that common goals drive collaboration between country team members on a common technology platform.

Incorporating the Human Touch

Of course AI cannot replace human intelligence gathering, the relationships that embassy officials develop. Yet such information needs to feed into the CRM platform, and this could be vastly facilitated by AI, via dialogue.

Most CRM implementations fail due to lack of user adoption. Users don’t like filling in data fields and won’t do so unless forced to; and if CRMs are not populated and maintained, they are useless. But what if an embassy officer went to a meeting with a contact and afterward simply initiated a conversational dialogue with an AI agent? The AI agent could be trained to elicit points that allow structured tagging to feed the CRM. “Whom did you meet? Is this the right spelling of their name and title? Do you have contact information? What issues did you discuss? Are other countries getting involved in supporting unrest over this mining investment? What are the next steps? When do they need to be taken and by whom?” And so on.

AI cannot replace human intelligence gathering, the relationships that embassy officials develop.

This sort of conversation-to-text tool is now being used in the medical field to transcribe and summarize meetings with patients. And the capability is being developed by leading CRM platforms.

AI can also be used to stimulate proactivity. It can search CRM casework and contact profiles for gaps—a vice-minister who has no documented U.S. embassy contact, or a private sector executive who hasn’t been contacted in three months, for instance. In concert with public news consumption, AI can create a prioritized listing of contact outreach for any embassy official. And it might be able to offer suggestions of important questions (e.g., “I saw that Brazilian firms may be in country seeking to assume that mining contract, can you confirm?”) based on those public sources and reporting from other embassy colleagues.

The same AI can generate any number of structured reports for officers to read or listen to even before they arrive at post (e.g., how investment is being treated in Panama, what labor unrest there is, who the key government contacts are and how to engage them). The beauty of AI is that it is dedicated to being responsive to natural language requests. If the data is accessible, then AI tools can already generate better summaries and points than most leave-behind briefs I inherited from my predecessors at post. Outgoing officers are typically scrambling to move, so briefing their replacements isn’t high on the list of priorities. AI-generated reports will give newly arrived officers a head start on maintaining and deepening relationships of interest.

Shifting the Culture of Diplomatic Work

In conversation with reporting officers, I’ve often heard exasperation with a 1950s mentality of reporting (e.g., “Cables aren’t saying much more than what I can find myself online”). How can we facilitate a shift in culture to acknowledge that the highest value added by reporting officers at post is offline human intelligence gathering and getting outcomes? What carrots and sticks need to be put in place, what sort of grading system?

Here the application of metrics might be tricky, but academia points the way. If AI is already capturing all public sources and feeding a CRM with the knowledge of an individual or ministry, then it can flag unoriginality in a reporting officer’s submission (e.g., “This report is just a rehash of articles in the local newspaper”). If, instead, that officer cultivates a relationship with a public official or mining executive and gathers original insights conveyed in the report, that is good. But how good?

One might imagine the creation of a grading system that rates any officer’s submission. If I do a report on a young, ambitious mining ministry official for whom there is little public source reporting, AI could be taught to rate that highly. And even more significantly, as AI synthesizes public sources and human intelligence from post that is then referenced by yet other reports on, say, the mining sector in Latin America, a grade for relevance based on number of citations could be added as well. Such a system is clearly possible with today’s technology.

This sort of grading would encourage officers to make longer-term investments in relationship-building that pay off for U.S. national interests well beyond the annual evaluation or departure from post. Imagine a scenario in which a relationship with a charismatic young labor leader like Luis Inácio Lula da Silva was developed and reported on—and paid off in dividends for years until he eventually became president of Brazil. AI could continue to flag the relevance of that initial relationship and ensure credits through a citations index for the officers who maintain the relationship as Lula grows in prominence.

The goal is to motivate reporting officers to get outside embassy walls and develop a wide array of relationships that are of national interest to the U.S., both in the short term (when, for example, a project calls for engaging them to block Chinese port investment) and in the long term (when a young private sector leader has presidential aspirations).

As Foreign Service personnel move to new postings, as frequently as every two years, that knowledge typically leaves with them, and their replacements have to start all over again.

A CRM platform with a case management module would allow ad hoc teams to address a problem with the ability to document their work. Commerce’s well-established Salesforce CRM case module, used to capture hundreds of billions of dollars of U.S. business wins globally, serves as a useful prototype. More important than the technology is senior leadership’s insistence that measurable goals for outcomes be defined, developed, and captured on one platform, across all relevant agencies. And that platform is logically where all profiles of individuals, companies, NGOs, and government entities are maintained and linked as needed to a case’s execution.

Commerce currently insists that its global workforce capture such information on its Salesforce CRM in order for anyone to get credit for their work. Ambassadors can make the same demand, and OMB can force agencies to use this common platform when at post.

What Could Go Wrong?

The State Department may not be ready. Changing the culture of reporting officers at State will not be easy. But after talking with multiple colleagues there, I firmly believe there is a newfound awareness that adapting or dying are today’s options. State’s senior-most leadership is telling ambassadors that there needs to be a change in business as usual and that they will themselves be held accountable for execution. And the report card approach—based on developing and documenting more relationships of interest, making original contributions, and finding relevance through citations—may focus the mind quickly if it is factored into evaluations.

AI may not be ready. If AI can’t reliably tag and structure the less-ordered intake of knowledge from, say, voice-activated dialogue, users will not embrace it. Early AI implementation in other U.S. government agencies has been met with considerable skepticism. And piloting an AI-dominant solution at a few posts will flag issues.

Other agencies must be on board. As the president’s representative at post, the ambassador will need to insist on participation—no more working in silos—and be willing to send agency reps home if they aren’t team players. When used widely, AI will become a more valuable resource for all agencies at post because its reports draw from a deeper well of knowledge.

Securing knowledge is tricky. It is almost certainly the case that profile management and methods for exerting leverage to win a mining concession need to be classified. That, in turn, may constrain some of the more innovative private sector solutions. And need-to-know protocols will have to be designed and implemented so that knowledge is compartmentalized and protected, but also available to those who need it. There may be pressure to have parallel systems, classified and unclassified, which will almost surely tank user adoption or, worse, result in leaks of knowledge that should be protected.

This issue needs to be hashed out thoroughly, but a simple if draconian approach would be to insist that the entire platform be classified, even while intake, capture, and tagging of media sources may sit initially outside and be pulled in for better analytical integration. An unclassified version of the AI tool could “read” an article in a Panamanian paper, transcribe it into English with relevant data tagging to facilitate storage and retrieval, and then create a mirror copy in the classified system.

What Will AI Bring to Diplomacy?

There is no shortage of wild futuristic scenarios for diplomats. My favorite is the idea of wearables for the obligatory embassy receptions, where I’m guided to engage with key contacts. As I approach them, my bot reminds me of my relationship with them and their children’s names and hobbies, as well as giving me a prompt or two for the key intelligence gathering I ought to be doing—which, of course, is being recorded automatically and simultaneously translated if my language skills are rusty.

We’re not there yet. But I believe there has never been a better time to be a diplomat posted abroad. AI will soon facilitate speeding up the learning curve, staying briefed on all relevant news, building profiles of key contacts, and winning outcomes for U.S. national interests. For diplomats, whose currency is that of developing and maintaining human relationships that are then used to further the mission, AI is a powerful tool rather than a competitive threat. The career diplomats who adapt to this disruptive technology will thrive and, I am convinced, be recognized for years to come for their contributions.

Daniel Crocker is a former Senior Foreign Commercial Service officer who served as deputy assistant secretary for Europe and Eurasia and as executive director for Western Hemisphere at the U.S. Department of Commerce. In a more than 20-year diplomatic career, he served in Europe and Latin America, as well as in Washington, D.C. He now works as a senior counselor for Veracity Worldwide.

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• “Six Elements of Effective Economic/Commercial Diplomacy” by Shaun Donnelly and Daniel Crocker, The Foreign Service Journal, January-February 2019
• “Can Diplomacy Be Done Virtually?” by Jessica Huaracayo and Alexis Ludwig, The Foreign Service Journal, April 2021
• “New Tools for Better Foreign Policy” by Dan Spokojny, The Foreign Service Journal, June 2024