Army HRC Testing AI-Enabled Personnel Screening Solution

The U.S. Army is testing the use of artificial intelligence to handle personnel selection, an official from the service said.

According to Lt. Col. Kristin Saling, director of the innovation cell at the Army Human Resource Command, her team used a natural language computing program to train an AI model on hundreds of thousands of past evaluations carried out by selection boards with the aim of letting the AI itself do the evaluation in the future. Saling expects the automated process to be significantly faster, noting that it currently takes weeks for a selection board to perform its task, Federal News Network reported.

The use of NLP for screening was done ahead of a planned pilot program to use AI for the process. According to Saling, her team had set up a system of dry runs that involved an AI model trained using around 140,000 evaluations.

According to the official, the AI model will rank around 1,800 records using an ensemble that looks at evaluations and other criteria. The pilot program will be run alongside the traditional selection board and will be used to determine how to proceed in 2023.

The HRC director hopes that the AI-based selection board will be put into production in 2023.

Saling’s team worked with the HRC Command Management Division and the Department of the Army G-1’s board Secretariat to create the programs that will be used for the selection board.