AVA-X in Dahlonega: Three Days at IAFIE 2026

For three days in the foothills of Georgia, the world's intelligence education community gathered around one question: what happens when artificial intelligence, cyber operations, and intelligence tradecraft collide?

From 31 May to 3 June 2026, the International Association for Intelligence Education (IAFIE) Annual Global Conference convened at the University of North Georgia Dahlonega Campus under the theme The Convergence of Artificial Intelligence, Cyber, and Intelligence on Global Security Interests. Hosted at UNG and set up by Dr. Edward (Eddie) Mienie, IAFIE Conference Chair, and Dr. Bryson Payne, the gathering brought intelligence educators and practitioners together on the UNG conference site.

Among the speakers was Armand de Beer, CEO of SAFEZA AVA-X and President of AVA-X, Inc., invited to bring a perspective rarely heard in those rooms: that the hardest operational environments on earth are not a liability for AI security companies. They are the curriculum.

Why UNG, and why Dahlonega

The University of North Georgia is not a generic conference venue. It is one of six U.S. senior military colleges, with programs that cut across cybersecurity, strategic and security studies, criminal justice, international affairs, and spatial data science. Hosting IAFIE sits squarely inside UNG's strategic big bet to Get in the National Security Game: build the people, partnerships, and research capacity the security enterprise actually needs.

Sessions ran at the Mike Cottrell College of Business on the Dahlonega Campus, about 75 miles north of Atlanta, with the gold steeple of Price Memorial Hall as the campus landmark behind the week. Dr. Mienie, executive director of UNG's strategic and security studies program, chaired the conference. Dr. Payne, director of UNG's Institute for Cyber Operations, helped shape the academic program. Attendees from roughly 20 countries filled the Cottrell Center for three days of keynotes, panels, and student work.

What IAFIE is, and why it matters

IAFIE was formed in June 2004 after intelligence educators from national security, competitive intelligence, and law enforcement met at Mercyhurst College in Erie, Pennsylvania. The association's purpose is straightforward: advance research, knowledge, and professional development in intelligence education; set standards; share curricula and tradecraft; and connect academia, government, and industry.

That is why the room matters. IAFIE is not a trade show. It is where educators, analysts, commanders, and practitioners stress-test how intelligence is taught, practiced, and defended. This year's program spanned keynotes from senior U.S., allied, and industry voices, including Suzanne Spaulding (CSIS), Lt. Gen. Stephen Fogarty (Ret.), Nicole Robinson (DataPath), Andrew Borene, Brig. Gen. Yosef Kuperwasser (Ret.), and Dr. Phil Kowalick (AIPIO), alongside breakouts on AI in national security, cyber threats, hybrid warfare, homeland investigations, and the future of intelligence education.

The debates were not abstract. They were about trust, sourcing, cognitive warfare, false confidence in models, and whether the next generation of analysts will be shaped by tools that amplify judgment, or replace it. AVA-X spent those three days in that room for a reason: sovereign AI is not a slogan in a pitch deck. It is an operational requirement for nations and agencies that cannot afford black-box dependency.

The session: South Africa as the unexpected training ground

On Monday, 1 June, at 13:45 EST, Armand took the floor in Breakout Session #3 under the track Impact of Technology on Homeland Security and Criminal Investigations, moderated by Dr. John Comiskey.

His paper title cut straight to the argument:

"South Africa's Reality: The Unexpected Training Ground for Sovereign AI."

The thesis is simple, and uncomfortable for markets that treat Africa as a footnote: if your models only ever learn in clean, controlled, high-resource environments, they will fail where it matters. South Africa's security reality forces AI to earn its keep under pressure that most lab datasets never see.

The numbers behind the proving ground

That pressure is measurable. According to South African Police Service (SAPS) recorded crime statistics for the 2023/24 financial year, South Africa logged 27,621 murders, a rate of roughly 45 murders per 100,000 people. In the October to December 2024 quarter alone, SAPS recorded 6,953 murders, about 75 people killed every day, even as the quarter showed a nearly 10% year-on-year decline.

Property and street crime compound the operational load. In 2023/24, SAPS recorded more than 22,700 carjackings and roughly 147,000 robberies with aggravating circumstances. Contact crime remains a daily reality for control rooms, investigators, and private security teams who need detection that works in dense urban feeds, poor lighting, and high alert volume, without shipping sensitive video to someone else's cloud.

Those conditions are why SAFEZA AVA-X trains and hardens models in Cape Town: density of threat, diversity of faces and scenes, pressure on law enforcement, and a hard requirement for on-premises systems under local control. That is the proving ground behind AVA-X: Swiss-engineered technology, commercialized through SAFEZA AVA-X, and now carried into the United States through AVA-X, Inc. Facial recognition, object detection, and predictive video analytics built for operators who need accuracy without surrendering data sovereignty.

In a conference obsessed with the convergence of AI and intelligence, that message lands differently. It is not theory about what AI might do. It is evidence of what AI must survive before it deserves a seat in a control room.

Why IAFIE matters for AVA-X

Speaking at IAFIE puts AVA-X in the same conversation as the institutions that train the people who will buy, govern, and challenge AI in security. Intelligence education is where doctrine forms. If sovereign, auditable, operator-in-the-loop AI is going to become standard practice, not optional marketing, it has to be argued where curricula and tradecraft are being rewritten.

For AVA-X, Inc., still early in its U.S. chapter after SelectUSA and incorporation, Dahlonega was not a side trip. It was a statement of where the company belongs: in the rooms where global security interests meet the hard limits of technology, hosted by a university deliberately positioning itself at that intersection.

What we take home

Across three days of panels, keynotes, and corridor conversations, one thread kept returning: AI will reshape intelligence, but only institutions that keep humans accountable, data under control, and models honest about their limits will reshape it well.

South Africa taught AVA-X that lesson the hard way. IAFIE 2026 at UNG gave Armand de Beer the stage to say it out loud.

About AVA-X

The AVA-X group operates across three entities: AVA-X AG (Switzerland), where the core technology originated; SAFEZA AVA-X (South Africa), the operational proving ground; and AVA-X, Inc. (United States), the contracting and support entity for the American market.

Learn more at ava-x.us, explore our AVA-X products, or get in touch. Conference details remain on iafie.org and the UNG IAFIE page.