Pentagon looking to scale AI-infused enterprise task management platform to more than 150K users

The Pentagon released a solicitation Tuesday as it continues its quest for new artificial intelligence tools to assist with back-office functions.

While AI capabilities developed for battlefield use often garner headlines, the Defense Department also wants technology to help with more mundane activities. The call for solutions for a Joint Enterprise Task Management System (JETMS) is one of the latest examples.

Today’s tasking processes are fragmented across legacy systems, email and manual trackers, according to officials.

“This creates operational friction, requires extensive manual data entry, and denies leaders real-time visibility into enterprise workload and task status,” they wrote in a call for solutions.

The Pentagon is looking to reduce the time expended on these efforts with new capabilities that are intuitive to use and require little training.

“The Department of War (DoW) seeks a commercially available AI-enhanced platform for both Office of the Secretary of War’s (OSW) Correspondence and Task Management System (CATMS) and the Army’s Enterprise Task Management Software Solution (ETMS2). The objective is to acquire a mature, scalable, and secure solution that will radically reduce administrative burden and accelerate decision-making across the enterprise,” officials wrote, using secondary names authorized by the Trump administration to refer to the Department of Defense and the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

The Pentagon seeks artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities that can “automate the task lifecycle” by performing “intelligent” intake and classification, drafting, routing, and response generation “based on the repository of authorized documents,” per the solicitation.

Officials envision a wide user base for the AI-infused task management system. The call for solutions stated that a core objective is to demonstrate a multi-tenant cloud architecture that can scale to over 150,000 active daily users.

With both speed and security in mind, the Pentagon is interested in vendor offerings that can smoothly integrate with existing identity, credential, and access management (ICAM) solutions and obtain a rapid authority to operate (ATO) from the Pentagon, among other desired attributes.

To prevent vendor lock, the department intends to retain unlimited rights to its data and workflow configurations, officials noted.

The deadline for vendors to submit solution briefs is March 9.