Charles Lyons-Burt
In April, the U.S. Army debuted a new generative AI program called the Army Enterprise Large Language Model Workspace. The suite of tools is meant to streamline tedious back-office tasks like writing up job descriptions and outlining experience requirements. The service’s chief information officer, Wash100 Award winner Leonel Garciga, said that this optimizes the genAI usage at the Army — for behind-the-scenes processes that are not unlike those being completed at a commercial company, Breaking Defense reported.
The new program is a result of the combination of work done under Garciga’s team’s Project Athena and former Army Deputy Assistant Secretary Jennifer Swanson’s #CalibrateAI initiative. It is hosted on the Army’s cArmy Cloud and is being deployed at Impact Level 5 — a Department of Defense designation that includes controlled unclassified information, or CUI and national security systems that need a higher level of protection than those at IL4.
Join top Army leaders for a day of revealing modernization discussions at the 2025 Army Summit this Wednesday, June 18! Both aforementioned execs — Leonel Garciga and Jennifer Swanson (who is now a Cypress International vice president) — will be speaking, alongside many other notable DOD and private sector decision-makers. Register for the year’s most important Army GovCon conference today. Limited spots remain.
GenAI Use Cases at Army
When the Army tested generative AI last year, it found that it tested the best with data-centric tasks that didn’t involve military hardware or warfighter enablement. This taught the service that it needed to be careful about where it implemented genAI as opposed to other kinds of AI.
“It taught us the lesson that that we really need to understand the data sets we’re working with,” Garciga commented. “Sometimes people come [to the CIO] and they’re like, ‘We’re gonna throw an LLM at it!’”
GenAI tests with its helicopter fleet’s aviation safety software yielded confused and muddled responses, the CIO said. However, much more promising results came from breaking down vendor proposals for acquisition personnel, scouring social media for public affairs team members and aiding the legal staff with assessing and organizing lengthy regulations.
Swanson noted that genAI could also potentially compose software code, but that there’s still a lot of progress there that still needs to be made.
AI on a Budget
Budget constraints are also at the top of Army officials’ minds when considering the implementation of pricey genAI programs. According to Defense One, genAI has been successfully used by an Army command to execute on a two-day challenge that entailed “national-level data.” But this endeavor quickly racked up a hefty price tag due to the cloud computing needed to support it.
“How we control costs is really important. Because what we certainly don’t want to end up with is a massive cloud compute bill,” Swanson stated.
Swanson will speak on a panel at the Potomac Officers Club’s 2025 Army Summit that will delve into how to transform military supply chains with agentic AI, a cutting-edge type of AI that is shaking up the industry right now. Don’t miss this great GovCon networking and learning opportunity!
But Garciga issued that the majority of cloud service provider partners the service has worked with under contract to power its genAI experimentation have diligently put in place “hard stops” and “guardrails” so that gross over-spending doesn’t become an issue.
The Army is working steadily to consolidate its cloud contracts under one vendor at a time as much as it can so that it can just pay one party rather than having to pay both the product maker and the CSP. Oracle is the latest beneficiary of this new strategy.
How Was the Army LLM Made?
The Army Enterprise LLM Workspace was announced in April and scheduled for deployment at the end of May. It was created by Ask Sage, a Bentonville, Virginia-based company that was founded by former U.S. Air Force Chief Software Officer and technology thought leader Nicolas Chaillan. The company received a five-year, $49 million indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract to make the workspace and utilized products from OpenAI and Microsoft, Google, AWS and more.
Time is running out! Register for the 2025 Army Summit and attend on June 18 at the Hilton McLean in Virginia to hear a keynote address from distinguished CIO Leonel Garciga.
