DOD Using AI to Drive Business Processes, Official Says

The reality of the Department of Defense’s artificial intelligence projects is “much more mundane” than what some might be imagining, a top technology official at the Pentagon said.

Lt. Gen. Michael Groen, director of the DOD’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, said that AI is being used to drive business and production environments, C4ISRNET reported Friday.

“It’s easy for us to see models for how we need to transform the department. And this is what we’re after,” Groen said.

Groen, a speaker at a past Potomac Officers Club event and a two-time Wash100 winner, added that AI gives the DOD the data processing power it needs to address the increasing volume of information that the military services bring in.

The general said that AI’s advantages in the information domain are comparable to the benefits of an automobile in the physical domain.

In February, the DOD launched a Chief Digital and AI Office to accelerate the defense community’s adoption of AI and other advanced technologies. JAIC is one of the organizations consolidated under CDAO.

Led by Craig Martell, a former machine learning leader at Lyft, CDAO is expected to eventually succeed JAIC and the Defense Digital Service.

The DOD had 685 AI projects as of April 2021, according to an initial inventory report cited by the Government Accountability Office.

A DOD official told GAO that it is difficult to get discrete funding figures for AI projects as they are typically part of a larger program.