U.S. Army soldiers in the field will soon use AI in a cloud-based intelligence platform to help them better execute their missions, a top service official said Wednesday at the Potomac Officers Club’s 2025 Army Summit.
Lt. Gen. Karl Gingrich, Army deputy chief of staff for G-8 programs, said soldiers will use AI in the Army Intelligence Data Platform, or AIDP, which organizes data for faster information processing and decision-making. He said AI will help Army intel analysts leverage the amount of data they consume from all sources, whether it is open source intelligence, or OSINT, or intel derived locally from the battlefield.
Once the soldiers have all of their data in the right place, Lt. Gen. Gingrich said they will run applications on top of the data to better leverage today’s modern technologies. AIDP, which has been deployed and operationalized to units in all priority theaters, has capabilities such as data ingress, processing, egress, persistence and discovery.
Lt. Gen. Gingrich expects AI to quickly spread to other capabilities.
“I think, over time, you’ll start to see it proliferate into unmanned systems,” he said during his keynote address. “That’s something that we want and will continue to work on through [program managers] and [program executive officers].”
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How the Army Is Using AI to Write Requirements Documents
The Army is also in the early stages of using AI to write requirements documents. Lt. Gen. Gingrich said the service is automating a standard template and is leveraging a large language model to write requirements and, if necessary, integrate them with other existing requirements.
Lt. Gen. Gingrich said the Army automated building a performance objective memorandum, or POM, by using Microsoft computing tools Power Query and Power BI. These tools, he said, allowed the Army to build a POM and perform course of action development without disturbing the authoritative data. Power Query is an Excel add-in that simplifies data discovery, access and collaboration while Power BI visualizes data.
Previously, soldiers were typing numbers into an embedded Excel spreadsheet over and over. Lt. Gen. Gingrich said the service is looking to bring in companies to help it further automate data manipulation.
Despite building a POM without creating a single PowerPoint slide, Lt. Gen. Gingrich said the Army will continue to use PowerPoint despite trying to wean itself off it.
“We still have to do PowerPoint because that’s what makes us feel good, [to] be honest,” he said.
Army RDT&E Budget Consolidation
The Army will consolidate much of its FY 2026 research, development, test and evaluation, or RDT&E, budget request, specifically less complex programs, into three different portfolios with single budget line items in an attempt to accelerate fielding emerging technologies. Lt. Gen Gingrich said these three portfolios will be:
- Counter small unmanned aircraft systems, or C-sUAS
- UAS
- Electronic warfare
This, he said, should allow the service to procure critical technologies faster to respond to a current threat instead of buying something for five years based off of a threat from seven years ago. Larger, more complex, acquisition programs will still have longer-term and more formal POM planning.
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