Former AFRL CIO, director of digital capabilities joins OpenAI

Alexis Bonnell has stepped down from her positions at the Air Force Research Laboratory and transitioned to a new job at OpenAI, the company responsible for the development of ChatGPT.

In 2023, Bonnell was tapped to serve as AFRL’s first-ever chief information officer and director of the laboratory’s Digital Capabilities Directorate, where she led the lab’s information technology strategy and overall modernization efforts. According to a Tuesday post on LinkedIn, Bonnell is now working at OpenAI as a partnership manager, a position she took on in March.

“The role [at AFRL] was truly one in a lifetime — serving the national security mission alongside some of the most brilliant scientists, engineers, and digital visionaries in the country,” Bonnell wrote. “From cybersecurity to networks and infrastructure, from enterprise service design to pushing the frontiers of AI, I couldn’t be more proud of what we built together—or more confident in the team carrying the mission forward.”

While at AFRL, Bonnell was at the forefront of the lab’s push to develop new artificial intelligence capabilities for warfighters. She was instrumental in launching the Air Force’s experimental generative AI chatbot known as NIPRGPT — a model that has since been scaled to other organizations across the Defense Department such as the Defense Information Systems Agency.

“Helping to launch one of the first human-machine teaming research platforms in DoD, built with open-source tools and volunteer effort, was a career highlight. So was advancing AI adoption across the force, making the theoretical practical,” Bonnell wrote.

Before joining AFRL, Bonnell was Google Public Sector’s emerging tech “evangelist,” where she helped the Defense Department and other federal agencies adopt new capabilities such as cloud, AI and zero-trust cybersecurity strategies.

As she returns to the private sector, she expects to dive deeper into artificial intelligence capabilities and explore how the technology can contribute to public service, she said on LinkedIn.

At OpenAI, Bonnell will “support extraordinary public sector organizations like the U.S. National Labs to research and apply frontier current and future AI models to the grand challenges of research, science, innovation, and national security,” she wrote.