The Army is evaluating a variety of AI generation 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 use cases and cost models of commercially available genAI technology that can be used to support office service work. The effort is led by Army Chief Information Officer Leonel Garciga along with the Office of Enterprise Management (OEM). The evaluation is scheduled to be completed 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 will evaluate various tools so that we can equip the military 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 it?” Jennifer Swanson, deputy assistant secretary of the Army for data, engineering and software, said Tuesday during a roundtable with reporters.
The goal of Project Athena is not to select a single generational AI platform and mandate its use across the service, but rather to provide options to Army offices that detail the advantages and disadvantages of each capability—including their specifics. different, use cases, cost models. and deployment architectures, Swanson said.
Over the past year, the Army and others in the Pentagon have been working to figure out how new genAI platforms that use large linguistic models (LLM) can be integrated into the department.
While some efforts have examined the technology’s applicability to combat functions, the most promising use cases are those that support day-to-day business operations. In October, the service announced a new pilot called #CalibrateAI, focused on simplifying repetitive and tedious tasks, which has since been rolled out under Project Athena.
“We really wanted to focus on where we had this opportunity to use capabilities at scale, to make some of those use cases work [and] look at some different models”, said Garciga during the table. He added that Project Athena is evaluating a range of tools – from off-the-shelf commercial software that can be deployed in existing environments to integrated LLMs for existing skills.
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 evaluating documents related to requests for information (RFIs) and analyzing 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 is devoted to informing leaders of the actual cost of implementing the capabilities—which may require computing additional cloud and storage infrastructure that can become too expensive for some offices to manage.
“We want to make sure that we’re informing them from the point of view of, that’s really what you have to consider when you’re spending that money to make sure that we’re getting the best deal for the military and to do sure we’re aware of all the bills that can come with the tools,” Swanson said.
Several genAI tools and platforms are already operational, accredited and networked through Project Athena, according to Garciga. After the pilot ends in April, the Army plans to release 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 put things on the network and just make it work, but a lot of it has also been, what does that mean from an enterprise perspective? How do I connect identities to it? How do we work out where we put the data?” Garciga said. “We can standardize it a little bit so it makes sense.”
