DOW Turns to Training, Access to Drive GenAI.mil Adoption

David Jin is known for establishing the War Department’s bespoke artificial intelligence platform, GenAI.mil, in 74 days, but the more lasting impact might be the department’s approach to introducing the technology to its 3-million-person workforce and getting them to embrace it.

“The government has five to six generations of people within its civilian workforce, within its contractors,” Jin, DOW’s acting deputy chief digital and AI officer, said Tuesday at the ACT-IAC Digital Transformation Summit. “Folks who are now coming into the services, maybe some of them are kind of digital natives. I think in the future, some of them will have grown up talking to or working, interacting with AI models … But also folks on the other side of the equation who in order to be able to begin use it effectively and understand what it can do, what it can’t do, it’s super helpful to have that one-on-one, that two-on-one [instruction].”

The Pentagon debuted GenAI.mil in December 2025 to provide the department with new generative AI capabilities, but ensuring those tools took root depended as much on how they were introduced as on the technology itself.

Jin said to help ensure personnel could see the value of those new tools, DOW partnered with AI labs to offer no-cost training for commands to use, as well as outreach sessions to help explain how the technology works and how it can be applied to tasks like contracting, HR or other workflows.

After initially launching with Google’s Gemini models, GenAI.mil has since expanded to include OpenAI’s ChatGPT and SpaceX’s Grok models. The platform now has nearly 2 million users across the department, including service members, civilian employees and contractors.

Jin said that across the platform, users are deploying the models for different use cases related to their mission, something that was accelerated not by cataloging every capability but by demonstrating what the models could do and letting users apply them.

“Early on within the department … We had a tendency to do some of this like overanalyzing, kind of analysis by paralysis of like all the use cases,” he said. “Here has really been, ‘Hey, we just got to give this capability to people.’ Give people the foundational knowledge about how it works. It’s moving really quickly. You’re not able to fully keep up with it, but that’s how you really build, you know, an AI-first, an AI-familiar, comfortable workforce within the department.”

Acting Army CIO Gabe Chiulli said on the panel that GenAI.mil has also given the service more flexibility and bandwidth to focus on its own AI projects rather than managing a separate enterprise platform.

“It opened up my aperture to not have to focus on running something at the enterprise level,” he said.

As a result, the Army established its Army Rapid Implementation of Artificial Intelligence (Project ARIA) program in March to tackle projects like automating its planning, programming, budgeting and execution; stand up its own AI model armory; and apply AI tools to its supply chains to advance its predictive maintenance capabilities.

The service has since launched its own AI-enabled DevSecOps platform, dubbed “Project Gatekeeper”.