July 9, 2026: The American firm Enabled Intelligence was assigned the task of turning video from over 500,000 hours of Ukraine War drone operations into formats that enable the training of AI systems as well as drone operators and officers who command units armed with drones.

Full-motion drone video footage is increasingly important as drones dominate modern warfare and commercial uses. The American National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency contracted Enabled Intelligence in 2025 for a $100 million per annum over seven years. The Sequoia data-labeling-as-a-service contract encompasses work to train computer vision algorithms for use in ISR/Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance, or ISR missions.

The Ukraine footage is valuable because it shows what actually happened in hundreds of thousands of drone operations. This includes the weather, terrain, and enemy countermeasures.

America-based, data-labeling and AI startup Enabled Intelligence is increasing its database of refined datasets that government and commercial firms use for model training and other tasks that make use of the half-billion hours of Ukraine War drone videos. Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the Ukrainian military has captured a huge volume of combat videos capturing actual combat activities.

The steadily growing visual record is creating vast amounts of training data that’s enabling military observers and defense contractors to innovate weapons capabilities based on modern tactical lessons at rapid rates, including AI models that allow drones to autonomously recognize and strike targets. This includes separate datasets of numerous sensor types, including electro-optical, synthetic aperture radar, infrared, and foreign-language audio.