DOD’s Chief AI Officer Launches Rapid Capability Cell, Frontier AI Pilots to Accelerate Adoption of Cutting Edge Tech

The Pentagon’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office today launched a new rapid fielding effort to spearhead a series of new initiatives aimed at accelerating the adoption of advanced artificial intelligence capabilities across the Defense Department.

The CDAO’s Artificial Intelligence Rapid Capabilities Cell, or AI RCC, will partner with the Defense Innovation Unit to execute four initial Frontier AI pilots that will apply generative AI models to both warfighting and enterprise management use cases.  

The pilot initiatives are part of the AI RCC’s broader efforts to capitalize on emerging technologies and put advanced AI capabilities in the hands of warfighters and key DOD enablers. 

The department’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer, Dr. Radha Plumb, who also holds a doctorate. in economics, underscored the imperative for the DOD to seize AI as she announced the launch of the new initiatives today.  

“The U.S. and the U.S. private sector, in particular, is at the cutting edge when it comes to artificial intelligence,” Plumb said. “At the same time, it’s important to recognize that AI adoption by adversaries like China, Russia, Iran and North Korea is accelerating and poses a significant national security risk.” 

In response, she said DOD is taking “an all-hands-on-deck approach” to ensure the U.S. continues to lead in the adoption of AI.

“The United States’ decisive and enduring advantage lies in the innovation that’s inherent in the commercial sector and the department’s ability to incorporate that into our critical missions,” Plumb said.  

Defense Innovation Unit Director Doug Beck said in a statement that the CDAO-DIU partnership on AI RCC “will allow us to shape critical AI initiatives in a way that incorporates the standards, policy and requirements from the beginning.”  

“The result will help us scale the tech faster and more reliably and will also help change the way the department thinks about software development and delivery tempo for the future,” he said. 

The AI RCC will accelerate and scale generative AI tools across 15 warfighting and enterprise management use cases ranging from command and control and decision support to software development and cyber security.   

Those areas of focus are based on findings from Task Force Lima, which Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks established in August 2023 to develop, evaluate, recommend and monitor generative AI capabilities across the department. The task force will officially be sunset with the establishment of the AI RCC.

The Frontier AI pilots will tackle four of those use cases — two focused on warfighting and two focused on enterprise management — to demonstrate the impact of generative AI in defense applications.  

As part of the pilots, CDAO will partner with combatant commands and DOD stakeholders to conduct incremental experiments utilizing the capabilities in development.  

It marks the first major effort to deploy leading edge AI to support warfighter needs in real time. 

In addition to the Frontier AI pilots, AI RCC will oversee key investments in underlying infrastructure needed to accelerate AI adoption across the department, including the establishment of digital “sandboxes” to enable AI testing and experimentation on government networks. 

AI RCC will also invest in rapid, user-centric experimentation using CDAO’s Global Information Dominance Experiment series to allow warfighters across combatant commands to test frontier AI models and provide real time feedback to developers.  

Additionally, Plumb announced today that CDAO will award $40 million in Small Business Innovation Research funding to non-traditional and small businesses for innovative generative AI solutions. 

For more information see the news release on the adoption of AI capabilities here, and the Artificial Intelligence Rapid Capabilities Cell fact sheet here.