US Army hopes AI will reduce administrative burden on troops

The Army’s biggest AI bet may not be on autonomous weapons, but on whether Silicon Valley software can tackle the military’s most tedious and often laborious administrative tasks.

Think fewer unmanned aircraft and more behind-the-scenes work like recruiting, equipment maintenance, and endless equipment inventories. Through a combination of new tools, redesigned workflows and data integration, logistics personnel and data experts are experimenting in hopes of modernizing the capabilities of the largest military branch, a herculean effort that leaders believe will cut down on manual processes that have frustrated soldiers for decades.

“AI is kind of the tip of the iceberg, and the rest is behind the scenes to move the Army forward,” David Markowitz, the Army’s chief data officer and chief analytics officer, told Business Insider about the vast, multibillion-dollar transformation effort.

It’s not yet clear which experiments will ultimately be successful across the service. But some of the most practical human endeavors could be improved. “No one knows the best ways to change than the people who go to work every day,” Markowitz said.

Recruiting: Solving one of the Army’s toughest jobs

Business Insider visited the company’s Arlington, Virginia, office. Every few months, dozens of soldiers meet with civilian engineers there to test and refine a new customer relationship management system built on the Salesforce platform. If adopted, this system could dramatically reduce the burden on Army recruiters. The job is widely recognized as one of the most exhausting and burnout-prone missions in the Army.

Recruiters are currently plagued by outdated processes.

Recruiters are still required to manually enter each candidate’s information during each interaction using a system that lacks the simple interface that most Americans take for granted on their cell phones. Waivers that many new employees need for fitness issues, test scores, and legal issues are also onerous. The Army says it believes AI could help simplify things.

Alex Miller, the Army’s chief technology officer, said the military conducted a study a year ago to determine how difficult it is for young people to join the military.

“We found that there were thousands of individual pieces of information that needed to be provided, much of it repetitive,” he said of the required paperwork. Even the simple act of copying names and addresses by hand can cumulatively take up hours of valuable time.

A small group of recruiters in the Midwest are testing early versions of the software and providing feedback to developers in near real time.

Miller said the testing department has cut administrative documents from hundreds to fewer than 10.

Faster maintenance

Change could come sooner for the military, which keeps its equipment running.

Richard Martin, director of supply chain logistics for Army Materiel Command, said the service is “on the verge” of allowing Soldiers to query maintenance and readiness data across their units using simple prompts.

Doing so could significantly reduce the time it takes to answer some of the most critical questions facing Army leaders.

“How many aircraft should we overhaul this fleet over the next three years to improve material readiness by 15%?” Martin explained that in the coming months, leaders will be able to fill out that prompt and receive data-driven recommendations that will feed directly into planning, budgeting and overhaul decisions, providing greater predictability for logistics managers.

Get some of the Army’s biggest and most expensive equipment, like the M2 Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle, he said. “Imagine if you could look across your entire fleet and enter the prompt, ‘Which brigade would benefit most from 30 overhauled Bradleys?'”

Currently, CTO Miller explained, it’s nearly impossible to narrow down the information to something that’s actually useful, similar to not being able to narrow down an overflowing inbox to a single email, or being given too many GPS routes when all you want is one good one. Most logistics data is managed only in spreadsheets and siled within departments.

The system can also flag the Army’s most trouble-prone individual equipment, such as some tanks that suck up millions of dollars in repair costs.

“This is the power of what we’re building,” Martin said. “We’re not there yet,” he admitted. “We are now in a position to be able to ask those questions.”

The Army and Marine Corps have struggled in recent years to maintain their armored vehicle fleets amid a shortage of spare parts and skilled mechanics. Officials say clearer, faster data could make preparations less difficult to consume up the chain of command.

“This allows us to think about how we manage our fleets in a completely different way,” Martin said.

Review of inventory

At the lowest levels of logistics, AI could save soldiers hours of the most tedious task: inventorying equipment by visually checking serial numbers on everything from rifles and radios to generators and trucks.

Although civilian industry adopted electronic inventories years ago, most of the military still does it the old-fashioned way: on paper. This is a multi-day process that inspects hard-to-access serial numbers during monthly or quarterly checks.

These inspections have real stakes for lower-level forces handling inventory. Even something as simple as misplacing documentation for an item being shipped to a maintenance depot can jeopardize your carrier.

“Imagine, instead of having to legitimately look up every serial number on every rifle, you could open the door, do an RFID scan, and know that every rifle is in the right place,” Martin said of the reform effort.

Army officials acknowledged there is no guarantee these efforts will be successful across the military. Some equipment items are so small that barcodes can be difficult to retain.

In other regions, data quality remains uneven, adoption can be slow, and too many new tools can overwhelm users rather than help them. Additionally, some systems, such as the Army’s payroll and contracting systems, are so outdated and essential that they cannot be easily updated.

Markowitz said the service is “constantly going through kind of a balancing act of figuring out what’s the right mix and getting feedback,” and iterative efforts to develop new technologies to ease the military’s workload.

“We are at exactly that stage of evolution.”