- The Pentagon must now send up to 1,400 reports to Congress annually
- GenAI.mil encouraged as a tool to speed up report writing and other productivity
- Workers were unsure how to use artificial intelligence – “so we blew right through it”
Senior Pentagon officials have publicly encouraged Defense Department employees to use its internal generative AI tool, GenAI.mil, to help them get routine, administrative work done more efficiently.
During a recent appearance, Chief Technology Officer Emil Michael referred to the AI-generated reports released by Congress as a success story, urging Pentagon employees to “use GenAI.mil, do the best you can.”
One example highlighted by Michael was statutory congressional reporting that the Department of Defense must submit. “Let me load all the paperwork on it and have it produce a congressional report that would otherwise take 200 hours of staff time and do it in five hours,” he said.
Pentagon admits to using artificial intelligence to generate reports for Congress
Michael ultimately concluded that congressionally mandated reports are repetitive and can require significant resources, but they are only read by a handful of people. He sees AI helping reduce the administrative burden, leading to more free time for workers to focus on higher-value tasks.
The Defense Department had to send about 1,400 reports to Congress in 2020, compared to just 500 in 2000.
GenAI.mil is a relatively new scheme that launched in December 2025 and is now estimated to have around 1.5 million daily users among its roughly 3.5 million employees.
Rather than being a grassroots development, GenAI.mil is more of a central hub for third-party military-grade AI tools to come together, described as a “tailored AI platform.” It first launched with Google’s Gemini for Government.
At the time, in late 2025, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said, “The department is leveraging America’s commercial genius, and we’re embedding generative AI into our daily battle rhythm.”
Being more of a hub for combining multiple tools, the War Department reiterated its commitment to “build[ing] an architecture that prevents AI vendor lock-in and ensures long-term flexibility.”
The Pentagon’s AI implementation has been a success story
While many companies around the world either struggle to get enterprise-provided AI into the hands of workers, fail to provide relevant tools altogether to combat shadow AI, the Pentagon’s implementation has been a success story.
This is likely due to the Department of Defense removing uncertainty about acceptable use and providing clear guidance on when it can be used. “It wasn’t really clear where to go for it, what you could use it for, the rules were unclear, so we just blew through it,” added Michael.
Familiarity with artificial intelligence, both through training and by making the platform easy to use, has also helped get GenAI.mil into the hands of more than two-fifths of all DoD workers. “So we just put it in front of them and then we do case studies on what it is that people use it for,” he added.
However, thorough human review remains imperative with people ultimately responsible for the output they share – workers are expected to review content before submitting it.
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