US Army to launch AI pilot project for acquisition workforce
Summary
The U.S. Army wants to better understand how its acquisition and contracting workforce could use generative AI to improve efficiency and is launching a pilot next month to explore those questions. “The pilot’s not just about increasing our productivity, which will be great, but also — what are the other things that we can do and what are the other industry tools that are out there that we might be able to leverage or add on,” Swanson said June 18 at Defense One’s Tech Summit in Arlington, Va. Swanson said she’s optimistic about the potential for generative AI, especially for laborious specialties like contract writing and policy where automation could release some strain on the Army’s workforce. But we’ve got to pilot and test it and make sure everybody’s comfortable with it first.” The large language model the service will use for the effort is different from systems like ChatGPT, Swanson said, because it is trained on Army data. As part of that exercise, Swanson said, the Army reviewed its spending on AI research and found that testing and security are the two biggest gaps toward fielding these tools more broadly.