- Pentagon now has to send upwards of 1,400 reports to Congress annually
- GenAI.mil encouraged as a tool to speed up report writing and other productivity
- Workers were uncertain about how to use AI – “so we just blew through that”
Senior Pentagon officials have publicly encouraged employees at the Department of Defense 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 that Congress has published as a success story, urging Pentagon staff to “use GenAI.mil, do the best you can.”
One example highlighted by Michael was legally required Congress reporting that the Department of Defense must submit. “Let me load all the papers onto it and have it draft me a congressional report that would otherwise take 200 hours of staffing time and do it in five hours,” he said.
Pentagon admits to using AI to generate reports to Congress
Michael ultimately concluded that congressionally mandated reports are repetitive and can require substantial resources, but they’re only read by a handful of people. He sees AI helping to reduce the administrative burden, leading to more free time for workers to focus on higher-value tasks.
The Department of Defense had to send around 1,400 reports to Congress in 2020, compared with just 500 in 2000.
GenAI.mil is a relatively recent scheme, launched in December 2025, and it’s now estimated to have around 1.5 million daily users among the roughly 3.5 million-strong workforce.
Rather than being a ground-up development, GenAI.mil is more of a central hub for third-party, military-grade AI tools to come together, described as a “bespoke AI platform.” It first launched with Google’s Gemini for Government.
At that time, in late 2025, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said: “The Department is tapping into America's commercial genius, and we're embedding generative AI into our daily battle rhythm."
Being that it’s more of a hub to combine multiple tools, the Department of War reiterated its commitment to “build[ing] an architecture that prevents AI vendor lock and ensures long-term flexibility.”
The Pentagon’s AI deployment has been a success story
While many enterprises around the world either struggle to get company-provided AI into the hands of workers, fail to provide relevant tools altogether to fight shadow AI, the Pentagon’s deployment has been a success story.
This is likely due to the Department of Defense removing uncertainty over acceptable use and offering clear guidance over when it may 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 that,” Michael added.
Familiarity with AI, both through training and making the platform easy to use, have 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 are the things people are using it for,” he added.
However, thorough human reviewing remains imperative with humans ultimately responsible for the output they share – workers are expected to review the content before submitting it.
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