Army Making AI Education Available to All

According to the Federal News Network, in August, the Army’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) Task Force announced it was making AI education available to all Army soldiers and civilian employees.

According to Doug Matty, Director of AI Capabilities at the Army’s AI Task Force, “All of our soldiers eventually will be involved on AI-enabled systems and capabilities. What we’re trying to do is start AI training at the top and go down, or just do a bottom-up. We’re trying to blend it across all the different layers where it can actually impact your Army in the quickest fashion.” Currently, this means a three-tiered approach to educate the Army workforce in AI:

* Develop and Educate Leaders – “The initial effort that we put under way was to get after developing and educating leaders across the Army,” Matty says. “We did that by using a couple of different executive education style courses and curricula. For AI, one of the fundamental efforts that you have to have is data and data management. We lead off with a short course that engaged Army senior leaders to walk them through the first principles of enterprise data management.”

* Develop and Educate AI Professionals (AI-savvy soldiers or those interested in AI development) – The Army is working with Carnegie Mellon University, one of the top universities for AI, to create curriculum for these courses. According to Matty, “It’s a fairly unique individual that you can find that can do all of the requisite skill sets that are required to be proficient in this area. We have one program that’s focused mainly on the data analytics side of it. There’s a number of military and civilians that are going through a 22-month program to develop them as data analysts. Then complementary to that is another program that’s a computational data science program.” The Army will pair data analysts with data scientists to work in development labs, modernization efforts, or on operational issues.

* Develop AI Technicians – The third tier is for individuals who will use AI every day but who do not need to know details. “It’s basically comprised of about a one-year intensive fellowship,” Matty says. “We bring in enlisted, warrant officers, and commissioned officers. We’re really trying to kind of spread it around the hierarchy of the military. During that year, they are given extensive education and opportunity. The program focuses on cloud architecture and how to do cloud solutions.” Individuals who complete the course will be able to then teach it, spreading AI functionality. According to Matty, “You start to see the scaling factor kick in as this ‘train the trainer’ model starts to be implemented, because each AI technician has the ability to train nearly 100 people over the course of the next year.”

For more on the Army preparing an AI-ready workforce, visit this Federal News Network article.

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