Defense and military technology leaders say that artificial intelligence (AI) is beginning to reshape how Pentagon organizations recruit, train, and retain employees, describing the technology as both a workforce draw and a multiplier.
Katharine Kelley, deputy chief of space operations for personnel at the Space Force, said that to recruit the right people, the federal government needs to become an “employer of choice” – not by rewriting individual jobs, but through modernizing routine tasks and eliminating inefficiencies.
“If you want to be an employer of choice … especially with the young talent … and you’re not speaking to their ability to do their job easier, faster, better – you’re the problem,” Kelley said while speaking at the Oracle Federal Forum in Washington on Tuesday.
Kelley said adoption of AI and automation can give the federal government an advantage as it competes with private industry for technical talent.
“You have got to understand who the workforce is that’s coming up and what they already understand how to do. And so, for me, it’s more like this is a necessity to make the Space Force an employer of choice and a place that somebody wants to stay and deliver and get value as a person,” Kelley added.
Speaking on a different panel, Defense Logistics Agency Chief Information Officer Adarryl Roberts called AI “a generational change,” and said his agency is working to prioritize workforce training across digital and technical skills.
“We’ve neglected and built what I consider talent debt, in the sense that we haven’t trained our civilian workforce like we train our military,” Roberts said. “If you look at the military, they become more modern, more technically savvy in the way that we fight at the individual level. We haven’t had the same consistency with our civilian workforce, and so being a mainly civilian agency, we’re focusing on that action.”
Roberts said that effort also requires balancing workforce upskilling with realistic expectations about what AI can do.
“We’re trying to fight the stereotype of ‘pay [for] all [of] this AI … to lay off 60% of our workforce.’ I don’t have enough people to do the work we have today. And so, we’re looking at AI as a force multiplier. We call it a digital employee,” Roberts explained.