The Department of Defense’s (DoD) newest artificial intelligence (AI) initiative is helping the Pentagon move swiftly to integrate generative AI into military and enterprise operations and ensure that the military keeps pace with industry advances, according to a senior official from the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO).
The Artificial Intelligence Rapid Capabilities Cell (AI RCC), launched in December 2024, was established by the CDAO to fast-track the deployment of frontier and generative AI (GenAI) tools across the DoD.
“AI RCC was created to focus on frontier AI and get pushing forward the adoption of frontier AI and generative AI technologies into the DoD,” Jonathan Elliott, acting director of the AI RCC, said on June 4 during the C4ISRNet conference.
“Our mission is to make sure that the DoD does not lag behind where we’ve seen industry adopt and use successfully a lot of these generative technologies. And I think there are many examples of use and benefit to the DoD,” he said.
The AI RCC – which builds on the findings of Task Force Lima – is focused on placing state-of-the-art AI capabilities directly in the hands of warfighters and defense personnel to improve operational effectiveness and decision-making. The capabilities include both warfighting and enterprise applications.
One such example, Elliott highlighted, is the integration of GenAI-powered chatbots – like ChatGPT – across DoD operations.
“You can now ask anybody at their desk and now have this tool there to help them research, summarize information right for them,” he said. “You see massive productivity gains from that.”
He noted the potential of GenAI in enhancing cybersecurity efforts, assisting with software development, debugging code, and processing the immense volumes of information that currently overwhelm human analysts.
With $100 million in funding allocated across fiscal years 2024 and 2025, CDAO and the Defense Innovation Unit are investing in pilot programs, experimentation sandboxes, and user-focused design to accelerate GenAI adoption.
“We’re helping make our warfighters more effective by taking that deluge and summarizing it down into actionable movements forward,” Elliott said.
According to Elliott, the pace of development in frontier AI models – the most advanced, large-scale AI systems – has surged recently, introducing capabilities that were not possible even a year ago. These models enable “agentic workflows” where a single query can trigger a complex chain of autonomous actions.
“In industry, you can see this with supply chain management. At home, I could ask a frontier model, ‘What are all the components in my motherboard?’ and it will identify the motherboard, search the internet, retrieve documents, extract relevant data, and summarize it in an Excel file – without me lifting a finger beyond the initial prompt,” Elliott explained.
“That’s like a game-changing capability as we start diving into the fact that the DoD is one of the largest creators and holders of data in the world, and we need to leverage and access that data,” Elliott said.