The Pentagon’s Chief Digital and AI Office is eager to expand its deployment of a new task automation platform — the “CDAO Wingman” — that’s designed to help defense and military users develop and scale their own digital assistants to offload document-heavy workflows and repetitive, compliance-driven functions.
“Many military departments have already been using this capability, but obviously technology is changing every day and evolving, and we want to make sure that everyone knows how to access it and have the ability to build out their own workflows on their own,” War Data Platform Program Director Elizabeth “Liz” Chirico said on a panel Tuesday at the UiPath Fusion conference, presented by FedScoop.
The platform combines AI, machine learning, large language models and other generative AI capabilities, as well as robotic process automation and low-code tools to let users create custom automations.
Wingman is fully coming to fruition at a time when the Defense Department is actively adopting AI and automation across all levels of operation. The CDAO’s War Data Platform team sponsored the Pentagon’s authority to operate (ATO) process, according to Chirico, in a move to “break out the automation suite” and make it available department-wide.
Now, the officials are hustling to scale Wingman across the military departments.
“So, the nature of a wingman is a digital assistant, essentially. How many people have a to-do list that they get through every single day? Not me. How nice would it be to have a digital assistant help you work through those workflows and delegate work to them for those repeatable tasks? Tasks that maybe don’t require as much critical thinking, but are super important and compliance-based. Oftentimes there has to be good content in a lot of required memorandums,” Chirico said. “You can look at this from any perspective — financial management analysts, contracting professionals, logistics professionals — across the whole spectrum, right?”
She shed light on several emerging and existing Wingman use cases and their early impacts.
“The Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for Procurement has automated over 150 workflows, leading to an annual cost avoidance of over $37 million a year and saving more than 687,000 work hours,” Chirico said. “So, that’s a lot of time back in your day, and everybody sure needs it because there’s always more work to be done.”
Her team is also piloting a new position description-writing bot, which will also ensure the posts meet proper requirements ahead of being published.
“We’ll probably be releasing it soon. We’re still kind of working through a few things and sharing that internally within our own leadership team,” Chirico noted. “But that’s an example of, like, we’re only bound by our own creativity [with the] the digital assistants that our teams can build out and deploy, and that’s really exciting to me.”
CDAO cyber officials are embedded end-to-end in this work, supporting both the platform’s security and enabling safer and faster platform upgrades.
Chirico invited DOD officials with interest in Wingman to contact the CDAO to identify and discuss current workflows that make sense to automate, or opportunities to refine and expand any existing automations.
“We want to be an enabler of the military departments, helping to better understand what challenges and outcomes they’re driving toward and how we can best help support them,” she said. “Again, we don’t want to get in anybody’s way.”
Written by Brandi Vincent
Brandi Vincent is a Senior Reporter at DefenseScoop, where she reports on disruptive technologies and associated policies impacting Pentagon and military personnel. Prior to joining SNG, she produced a documentary and worked as a journalist at Nextgov, Snapchat and NBC Network. Brandi grew up in Louisiana and received a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Maryland. She was named Best New Journalist at the 2024 Defence Media Awards.