Imperial War Museums (IWM), Capgemini, and Google Cloud today announced a significant partnership to successfully transcribe and translate over 20,000 hours of IWM’s oral history collection using AI technology.

This project will provide access to firsthand accounts of 20th-century conflicts for the public, researchers, and educators worldwide, utilising advanced generative AI to transcribe, translate, and facilitate interactive archive exploration.

IWM intends to make this new technology accessible to the public through its website later this year. This platform will enhance existing recordings and resources, enabling users to search through over two million collection items.

Improving access

Many of IWM’s 8,000 oral histories, dating from the 1940s to the 2000s, were only available as audio files, making access time-consuming. They capture unique conflict experiences but pose challenges, such as diverse expressions, military jargon, and varied audio quality.

Capgemini, working with Google Cloud, created an innovative solution to improve access to these recordings within IWM’s broader oral history collections.

The project used a sophisticated pipeline on Google Cloud with Gemini models for transcription and analysis. It extracts metadata, such as names of people, places, and military units, and creates detailed summaries of interviews, highlighting key events and themes.

This process, originally estimated to take about 22 years manually, will now only take a few weeks.

“This project is a big step forward in our mission to broadening access to our vast collections,” says Nick Hodder, director of digital engagement and transformation at Imperial War Museums.

“Our expert curators have been fully involved in this work, ensuring the technology delivers very high levels of accuracy, including understanding and interpreting accents, historical facts and military terminology. This landmark collaboration between IWM, Capgemini and Google Cloud is a significant innovation and a first for a UK museum.”

99% word accuracy

The technology achieves 99% word accuracy and 94% speaker diarisation in transcription tests. It enables users to search across interviews using free text, listen with synchronised transcripts, and access AI-generated summaries via an easy interface. An “ask a question” feature enables users to pose natural language queries about any interview, receiving answers accompanied by citations, thereby ensuring accuracy and supporting research.

“We are incredibly proud to partner with Imperial War Museums and Google Cloud on this culturally significant initiative,” says Steven Webb, UK chief technology and innovation officer at Capgemini.

“This project showcases the profound impact of generative AI in unlocking historical archives and making them accessible in new and engaging ways. It’s a testament to how technology can connect us more deeply with our past to inform our future.”

John Abel, managing director, office of CTO at Google Cloud, adds:

“Google Cloud is committed to empowering organisations like Imperial War Museums with AI tools that can transform how we interact with history. The use of Gemini models to process and understand such a vast and nuanced audio collection demonstrates the sophisticated capabilities of generative AI to overcome complex challenges and deliver meaningful outcomes.”

IWM plans to expand its AI capabilities by combining AI analysis with human expertise, enhancing access for researchers, academics, and the public.

Last month, it was announced that the National Archives Museum in Washington, DC will feature a new gallery powered by AI systems when it opens this autumn. The National Archives’ museum is currently undergoing a $40 million renovation, its first in 20 years, before opening to the public on 23 October.

Meanwhile, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has launched an AI-powered tool called ‘Art Explorer,’ which allows users to collect and compare artworks from the museum’s collection. The new tool enhances the Dutch museum’s 800,000-piece collection, making it more searchable and offering an interactive digital experience.

Cloud project management provider Monday.com Ltd. today unveiled three artificial intelligence-powered updates to its platform, aimed at boosting productivity and helping users build advanced work solutions without requiring technical expertise.

The new additions include monday sidekick, a context-aware AI assistant; monday magic, a quick way for users to instantly build complete functional workflows within the platform; and monday vibe, which is a “vibe” coding platform that allows users to build custom business apps using enterprise-grade security.

In an interview with SiliconANGLE, Daniel Lereya, chief product and technology officer at Monday.com, described the enhancements as a shift “from work management to work execution,” with a key emphasis on accessibility for nontechnical users.

“AI can actually accelerate our vision,” Lereya said. “It’s not just about putting new tech in place, it’s about giving more power to people who aren’t necessarily tech people, so they can get more business value with less friction.”

The AI sidekick behaves like a private assistant that understands the user’s role, company and work style, which proactively offers help. It’s essentially a copilot that sits within the Monday.com platform and anticipates what the user is trying to accomplish, enabling their work processes by understanding their day-to-day needs.

For example, if the user works in marketing, the sidekick can pull in data from customer relationship management and email to help generate valuable context, prep messaging and customize talking points for campaigns. If the user is a finance manager, the assistant might pull in budget metrics and offer suggestions for optimizing accounting.

“It knows who you are, your role, and your context,” said Lereya. “It doesn’t just assist; it works with you.”

Monday magic allows users to describe their business flow and needs in simple words. From there the AI system automatically builds the solution using the Monday platform’s AI building blocks, a process that might take hours or days of sifting through different components such as data tables and forms.

For example, a user who wants to build a simple, or complex, workflow for event management can tell monday magic: “I am a community manager running a tech event. I need a solution to manage event requests, coordinate event preparation tasks, speakers and schedules.”

The system takes it from there, generating forms, displays and dashboards — including a community manager dashboard, event coordinator dashboard, speaker manager dashboard and the like — all based on that prompt. The user can then adjust or customize the newly generated “Event Management Hub” using follow-up prompts or manually, as usual.

“It reduces the barrier even more,” Lereya said. “You don’t even need to know how to work with the building blocks.”

Finally, the third capability, monday vibe, enables users to build any business application using natural language prompts. Vibe coding refers to a growing trend in which developers and nontechnical users describe the “vibe” — the functionality and outcome they want — rather than writing code line by line. The AI handles implementation while users focus on vision.

Users describe what they want, and the platform generates tailored, secure code behind the scenes. Because it operates entirely within the Monday.com platform, apps built with vibe coding inherit the company’s enterprise-grade security, compliance features and integration capabilities. This makes them suitable for internal tools or upload to the Monday.com marketplace.

“In the enterprise space, this is going to be huge for us,” said Lereya. “You can build every tool you need and trust that it’s secure, compliant and fully integrated.”

Together, Lereya said these features mark a new phase in Monday.com’s AI strategy, which emphasizes not just assistance, but actual execution. He said AI that can carry out real work, on behalf of the user, within secure and customizable workflows.

Image: SiliconANGLE/Microsoft Designer

Domestic terrorism incidents in the United States surged by 357% between 2013 and 2021, as terrorist organizations began leveraging artificial intelligence, drones, and other advanced technologies for recruitment and attack planning. During this eight-year period, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) documented 230 domestic terrorism incidents, with racially and ethnically motivated attacks proving to be the most lethal and destructive.  

The alarming statistics come as federal agencies grapple with significant coordination challenges and emerging technologies that experts warn are creating unprecedented security vulnerabilities across critical infrastructure.  

“We’re seeing attacks against hospitals, water supply systems, rural schools—targets that would have been unthinkable in previous conflicts,” said Nitin Natarajan, former Deputy Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). “The rules are changing in what we’re seeing nation-states and cyber criminals do.”  

Digital Weapons in Terrorist Hands 

The convergence of accessible technology and extremist ideology has created what security professionals describe as a “perfect storm” for modern terrorism. Unlike traditional threats that required extensive resources and training, today’s digital weapons can be deployed by amateur users with devastating effect.  

“The beauty of cyberattacks is they don’t require boots on the ground; they can be executed globally, without borders, from anywhere,” Natarajan explained during a recent gathering of experts convened by Homeland Security Today to discuss evolving cyber, technology, weapons of mass destructions (WMDs), and tactics in the digital age. “Many can be low-cost yet still have disruptive impacts and effects.”  

Terrorist groups like ISIS have established sophisticated cyber units, including the United Cyber Caliphate, conducting everything from website defacements to denial-of-service attacks. While these may seem like small-scale operations, experts warn that advancing technology will enable more destructive capabilities with fewer resources.  

Federal Agencies Face Coordination Crisis 

Despite the growing threat, federal agencies tasked with combating domestic terrorism are struggling with fundamental coordination problems. A Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigation revealed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and DHS agents often don’t know when or with whom to share critical threat information.  

“When we spoke with agents on the ground, they said they didn’t always know who to share the threat information with and when to do it,” said Triana McNeil, Director of GAO’s Homeland Security and Justice Team. “That’s an issue when you’re trying to counter these threats.”  

The coordination problems extend beyond federal agencies. The nation’s first-ever domestic terrorism strategy, released in 2021, lacked: clear roles for state and local partners, performance measures to track progress, and identified resources to achieve its goals – all considered essential elements of effective national strategies – according to GAO’s report examining the National Strategy on Countering Domestic Terrorism.  

Private Sector Partnerships Under Strain 

Social media and gaming companies have become unlikely frontlines in the fight against domestic terrorism, with 33% of mass attack perpetrators posting content online and 20% of adult gamers exposed to extremist material. However, government partnerships with these companies remain haphazard.  

“There was no strategy, there were no clear goals about what you’re trying to achieve when you’re making these connections with different companies,” McNeil noted, describing the current approach as scattered and ineffective.  

The GAO found that while FBI and DHS have developed various tools to share and receive threat information from private companies, the efforts lack coordination and strategic direction.  

Next Generation Vulnerabilities 

Perhaps most concerning is how the next generation approaches cybersecurity. At a recent New York City event, college students shocked security experts when asked, “Are they thinking about cybersecurity in their day-to-life as they are using technology?” by declaring they “don’t care about privacy and we don’t care if people take our personal information theft.  

As Natarajan relayed this story, he warned. “We’d be remiss if we didn’t factor in how the next generation is looking at cybersecurity as part of their day-to-day life—it’s very different from how we look at it.”  

Critical Infrastructure in Crosshairs 

The water sector represents the next major vulnerability, with 141,000 utilities nationwide, many lacking basic cybersecurity protections. Iranian hackers recently exploited water systems using default passwords of “1111”—attacks that could have been prevented by changing passwords to “2222.”  

“When those victims were notified, they didn’t even know how to change the default password,” Natarajan revealed. “Some said the person who installed the system left five years ago and doesn’t work here anymore.”  

Food and agriculture systems face similar risks, with modern tractors now containing two million lines of code and extensive data flows that could be manipulated to disrupt everything from seeding to harvesting.  

Resource Constraints Amid Growing Threats 

These mounting challenges come as security agencies face potential budget cuts. CISA, which grew from 2,100 to 3,400 employees over four years with strong bipartisan support, now faces proposed reductions of 25-33%.  

“We are already outnumbered 50 to 1” against Chinese cyber operations alone, Natarajan pointed out, citing FBI Director Christopher Wray’s testimony. “That situation is only getting worse as we see reductions in funding and government workforce.”  

The intersection of emerging technologies, resource constraints, and evolving terrorist tactics creates an unprecedented challenge for homeland security. As experts noted, the threat landscape will only grow more complex as artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies become more accessible to those seeking to cause harm.  

“We need to make sure we’re doing more to build resilience into our nation’s critical infrastructure,” Natarajan emphasized, “and continue to take the lead internationally in setting standards that reflect our values and those of like-minded allies.”  

This article is based on key insights shared at Homeland Security Today’s COUNTERTERRORISM2025 summit.