- The US Army wants to see AI streamline some of its toughest behind-the-scenes jobs.
- Recruiters and logisticians are still using antiquated administration systems.
- Whether the experiments can succeed over the long term remains to be seen.
The US Army's biggest AI gamble may not be on autonomous weapons, but instead whether Silicon Valley software can tackle the service's most tedious and, more often than not, grueling administrative jobs.
Think less uncrewed aircraft and more behind-the-scenes tasks like recruiting, equipment maintenance, and endless gear inventories. Through a mix of new tools, redesigned workflows, and data integration, logisticians and data specialists are experimenting in hopes of modernizing how the largest military branch functions, a herculean effort leaders believe can cut the manual processes that have frustrated soldiers for decades.
"AI is kind of the tip of the iceberg, and you've got the rest of the thing underneath the waterline to make the Army go," David Markowitz, the Army's chief data officer and analytics officer, told Business Insider, speaking of the sprawling, multi-billion-dollar transformative effort.
It's not yet clear which experiments will ultimately succeed across the service. But improvements could be coming for some of the most hands-on, human endeavors. "No one knows how to best change than the folks who deal with the work every day," Markowitz said.
Recruiting: fixing one of the Army's most grueling jobs
Business Insider visited the Arlington, Va., office where, every few months, dozens of soldiers meet with civilian engineers to test and refine a new customer relationship management system built on a Salesforce platform. If fielded, the system may dramatically simplify the burden for Army's recruiters — a job widely seen inside the Army as one of the most exhausting and burnout-prone assignments.
Today, recruiters are bogged down by outdated processes.
Recruiters are still expected to manually enter each potential recruit's information during every interaction, using a system that lacks the kind of easy interface that most Americans take for granted on their phones. The waivers many recruits need for fitness issues, test scores, or legal run-ins are another hassle that the Army believes AI could help simplify.
A year ago, the service examined how much "toil" comes with enlisting a young person, said Alex Miller, who serves as the Army's chief technology officer.
"We found that there were thousands of individual pieces of information that they have to provide and most of them are repetitive," he said of the needed paperwork. Tasks as simple as copying down names and addresses by hand cumulatively suck up hours of precious time.
A small group of recruiters in the Midwest are testing early versions of the software, sending feedback to developers in near real time.
The test unit has slashed administrative forms from several hundred forms to less than ten, Miller said.
Faster maintenance
Change could be coming sooner for the troops who keep the Army's equipment running.
The service is "on the cusp" of allowing soldiers to query maintenance and readiness data across the force using simple prompts, said Richard Martin, the director of supply chain logistics at Army Materiel Command.
That could dramatically reduce the time it takes to answer some of the most consequential questions that Army leaders face.
"How many of this fleet should I overhaul in the next three years to improve material readiness by 15%?" Martin posed, explaining that in a few months, leaders will be able to enter that prompt and receive data-driven recommendations that feed directly into planning, budgeting, and overhaul decisions, offering greater predictability for logisticians.
Take some of the Army's biggest — and most expensive — gear, like the M2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, he said. "Imagine if I could look across the fleet and type in a prompt that says, 'What brigade would benefit the most from 30 overhauled Bradleys?'"
Right now, it's nearly impossible to narrow down information to what's actually useful, similar to not being able to narrow an overflowing inbox to a single email, Miller, the chief technology officer, explained, or being given too many GPS routes when you just need a single good one. Most logistics data is managed on spreadsheets alone, siloed within units.
The system could also flag the Army's most problem-prone individual gear, such as some tanks that suck up millions in repair costs.
"This is the power of what we are building," Martin said. "We're not there yet," he acknowledged. "We're now in the position where we have the capability to ask those questions."
The Army and Marine Corps have struggled in recent years to maintain armored vehicle fleets amid shortages of spare parts and skilled maintainers. Officials say clearer, faster data could reduce the readiness quandaries that consume chains of command.
"It lets us start thinking very, very differently about how we're managing our fleets," Martin said.
Inventory overhaul
At the lowest levels of logistics, AI might save soldiers hours of the most tedious work they do: Inventorying equipment by visually verifying serial numbers on everything from rifles and radios to generators and trucks.
While private industry embraced electronic inventories years ago, most of the military still does it the old-fashioned way — on paper. It's a process that demands days of inspecting hard-to-reach serial numbers during monthly or quarterly checks.
These inspections carry real stakes for the lower-level troops handling inventory. Even simple mistakes, such as misplaced paperwork for an item shipped to a maintenance depot, can threaten careers.
"Imagine not having to legitimately look at every serial number on every rifle — but to open up a door, take an RFID scan, and know every single rifle is in its right place," Martin said of the reform effort.
Army officials acknowledged that none of these efforts is guaranteed to succeed across the force. Some equipment items are so small that keeping a barcode could be tricky.
Elsewhere, data quality remains uneven, adoption can be slow, and too many new tools can overwhelm users rather than help them. And some systems are so antiquated and essential, like the Army's pay and contracting systems, that they can't be easily updated.
The service is "always in kind of a balancing act of what's the right mix and getting feedback," Markowitz said of the iterative efforts to field new technologies for troops to make jobs less punishing.
"We're in that kind of evolution stage."
