Army evaluating generative AI tools to support business ops
The Army is assessing a range of generative artificial intelligence tools and platforms to determine how the technology can streamline business operations and make them readily available to the service.
Known as Project Athena, the pilot aims to evaluate the use cases and cost models of commercially available genAI tech that can be used to support the service’s back-end office work. The effort is being led by the Army’s Chief Information Officer Leonel Garciga alongside the Office of Enterprise Management (OEM). The assessment is slated to end in April, after which the department hopes to create a list of capabilities that can be purchased by various service components based on their needs and mission requirements.
“We’re going to assess different tools so that we can equip Army organizations with information. What capabilities should you consider based on your use cases? What is the cost model and what do you need to know about that?” Jennifer Swanson, deputy assistant secretary of the Army for data, engineering and software, said Tuesday during a roundtable with reporters.
The goal for Project Athena isn’t to choose a single generative AI platform and mandate its use across the service, but rather provide options for Army offices that detail the pros and cons of each capability — including their different features, use cases, cost models and deployment architectures, Swanson said.
Over the last year, the Army and others at the Pentagon have worked to understand how emerging genAI platforms that leverage large language models (LLMs) can be integrated into the department.
While some efforts have looked into the technology’s applicability for warfighting functions, the most immediately promising use cases are those that support daily business operations. In October, the service announced a new pilot dubbed #CalibrateAI focused on simplifying repetitive and arduous tasks, that has since been brought under Project Athena.
“We really wanted to focus on where we had this opportunity to employ capability at scale, get some of those use cases operating [and] look at some different models,” Garciga said during the roundtable. He added that Project Athena is evaluating a range of tools — from commercial-off-the-shelf software that can be deployed on existing environments to niche, integrated LLMs for existing capabilities.
Garciga noted that generative AI has been very useful in supporting the Army’s legal teams, public affairs offices and recruiting efforts. The technology has also shown promise in assessing documents related to requests for information (RFI) and sifting through the Pentagon’s vast inventory of policy documents, Swanson added.
Because funding for the genAI tools will come from individual Army organizations that choose to purchase them, a large part of Project Athena has been dedicated to informing leaders about the actual cost of implementing the capabilities — which can require additional cloud compute and storage infrastructure that might become too expensive for some offices to manage.
“We want to make sure that we’re informing them from the standpoint of, this is really what you need to consider when you’re spending that money to make sure that we’re getting the best deal for the Army, and to make sure that we are aware of all the bills that may come with tools,” Swanson said.
Some genAI tools and platforms are already operationalized, accredited and on the network through Project Athena, according to Garciga. Once the pilot concludes in April, the Army plans to publish guidance based on lessons learned that were documented through the effort and work on what the service needs to do at the enterprise level moving forward.
“We want to throw stuff on the network and just operationalize it, but a lot of this has also been, what does this mean from an enterprise perspective? How do I hook up identities to it? How do we work on where we put the data?” Garciga said. “We could get that a little bit standardized so it makes sense.”
