The Pentagon aims to get AI tools to its entire workforce next year, the department’s chief technical officer said one month after being given control of its main AI office.
“We want to have an AI capability on every desktop — 3 million desktops — in six or nine months,” Emil Michael, defense undersecretary for research and engineering, said at a Politico event on Tuesday. “We want to have it focus on applications for corporate use cases like efficiency, like you would use in your own company…for intelligence and for warfighting.”
Four weeks ago, the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office was demoted from reporting to Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg to Michael, a subordinate.
Michael said CDAO will become a research body like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Missile Defense Agency. He said the change is meant to boost research and engineering into AI for the military, but not reduce its efforts to deploy AI and make innovations.
“To add AI to that portfolio means it gets a lot of muscle to it,” he said. “So I’m spending at least a third of my time—maybe half—rethinking how the AI-deployment strategy is going to be at DOD.”
He said applications would emerge from the CDAO and related agencies that will be tailored to corporate workloads.
The Pentagon created the CDAO in 2022 to advance the agency’s AI efforts and look into defense applications for emerging technologies. The office’s restructuring earlier this year garnered attention. Job cuts within the office added another layer of concern, with reports estimating a 60% reduction in the CDAO workforce.
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