DOD CDAO Wingman to Scale Automation Across Military

The Department of Defense’s (DOD) Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) is expanding the use of a new task automation platform dubbed CDAO Wingman. The platform is designed to help personnel build digital assistants to offload document-heavy and compliance driven workloads.

The DOD was rebranded as the Department of War by the Trump administration.

Speaking at the UiPath Fusion conference on Tuesday, Elizabeth Chirico, director of the War Data Platform in the Office of Research & Engineering for the CDAO, said the platform combines AI, machine learning, large language models, and other generative AI capabilities, as well as robotic process automation and low-code tools, to let users create custom automations.

“If digital assistants can take some of that workload off of your plate, that’s exactly what the Wingman capability is designed to do,” Chirico said. “The ability to scale is making it available to anybody who has access to the platform.”

As technology rapidly evolves, the aim is to ensure all military departments can build their own workflows, Chirico explained.

“We want to be an enabler of the military departments, helping to better understand what challenges and outcomes they’re driving toward and how we can best help support them,” she said.

In February, CDAO’s War Data Platform team sponsored the DOD’s authority to operate to make the automation suite available department-wide and is now working to expand it across the military departments, Chirico said.

She explained that the expansion of Wingman aims to “break out the automation suite” and make it available department wide.

“Many military departments have already been using [Wingman],” she said.

Using Wingman, the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for Procurement has automated more than 150 workflows, saved over 687,000 work hours and avoided more than $37 million in costs, Chirico said.

“That’s a lot of time back in your day, and everybody sure needs it because there’s always more work to be done,” she said.

Additionally, Chirico shared that her team has piloted a new position description-writing bot on the platform. She said it will be released soon.

“We’re only bound by our own creativity [with the] digital assistants that our teams can build out and deploy, and that’s really exciting to me,” she said.