John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, announced on Tuesday that the agency was reorganizing to ensure that it can adopt technology faster and further develop offensive cyberoperations division.

He promised that the agency would use new technology more aggressively and take “smart risks,” even as it prioritized human decision making and oversight of artificial intelligence and other innovations.

The changes are intended to strengthen the C.I.A.’s ability to collect intelligence by gaining access to additional computer networks or communications, or even just locating additional potential human sources. The overhaul, Mr. Ratcliffe said, is an acknowledgment that in the modern world, digital borders are as important as physical borders.

In his first major address as C.I.A. director, Mr. Ratcliffe said artificial intelligence is raising the stakes in America’s competition with its adversaries, since the new technology is itself a transformative weapon.

“In conversations with many of the president’s other national security and economic security advisers, we’re talking about the impact of these frontier A.I. models,” he said. “It would be, as we’ve talked about, not misplaced to refer to their capabilities as akin to digital nuclear weapons.”

To improve its collection, both through human spies and eavesdropping on communication networks, “more C.I.A. officers are going to have to become just as comfortable with handling lines of code as they are with handling human assets and sources,” Mr. Ratcliffe said.