Pentagon’s $200M AI Contracts Signal Broader Effort to Transform Talent

The Pentagon’s $200 million contract awards to artificial intelligence companies Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and xAI this week signals a growing vision for developing technology talent across the government to include the Army, said the Army’s innovation director.

“[The announcement] makes it all the more important that we have AI talent in uniform,” Army Recruiting Command Innovation Director Col. Kris Saling told GovCIO Media & Research. “The combination of our direct commission processes and our existing training with industry programs makes the divide between the military and industry more permeable.”

The Defense Department’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office’s new contracts awarded Monday aim to accelerate adoption of advanced AI capabilities — leveraging both the technology and talent of these companies.

Building an AI-Capable Workforce

As the Army works to transform its workforce to meet emerging national security demands, Saling emphasized that it’s not just about technology — it’s about rethinking how the service identifies, recruits and supports tech talent across domains.

“It’s not just a technology problem; it’s a holistic everything problem,” Saling said. “We’re looking at all the different types of tech talent, not just the technical skills … And I think we’re coming to the conclusion that the Army itself, across all of our branches and specialties, needs to be more technical. We really need to look and see where we need to have those specialists with depth of knowledge.”

Saling added that this means securing and cultivating the specialized skills essential for modern warfare and doing so amid external pressures, including congressional mandates, market competition and ongoing government efficiency efforts.

“We’re all competing for the same talent, and they tend not to stay in one place for very long,” she said.

From Silicon Valley to the Army

The Army is exploring new ways to connect with the tech sector. One strategy taps into reservist talent through specialized units like the 75th Innovation Command in Silicon Valley, which scouts technology aligned to Army modernization priorities.

“We have a whole detachment from the 75th Innovation Command that’s out in Silicon Valley. I’ve got some just absolutely incredibly talented folks on that team that we reach out and leverage,” Saling said.

Another major initiative is Detachment 201, a tech-reservist program designed to bring in experienced tech executives as senior advisors in the Army Reserve. These professionals, Saling said, bring a level of “executive integrator” talent that the Army historically hasn’t had at scale.

“It was about people who had experience and capability at integrating artificial intelligence solutions at the overarching enterprise level,” she said. “The folks who are taking those things at scale, getting them integrated into business processes, teaching the organization how to adapt and anchoring change that lasts when it comes to technology.”

Detachment 201 members are currently undergoing a direct commissioning course and are assigned “thesis projects” focused on solving major Army challenges. They’re supported by small teams, often reservists or experienced Army personnel, who help translate Army culture and terminology.

“When it comes to physical technology, our soldiers will take that and they’ll run with it,” Saling said. “We just haven’t shown that same level of adaptability in the digital space.”

GigEagle

The Army’s broader approach to recruiting technical talent reflects a shift toward more flexible and project-based models. Saling said that much of the service’s technical work resembles “gig work” — requiring creative hiring approaches beyond traditional full-time roles.

“A lot of our technical work is really gig work. We don’t have enough [work for only full-time talent], so we really have to be creative in getting them engaged if we’re going to keep them,” she said.

One tool is GigEagle, a Defense Department platform designed to match reservists and other personnel with short-term assignments based on skills using AI. The program supports the Pentagon’s move toward skills-based hiring and talent fluidity, said 75th Innovation Command Chief Talent Officer Maj. Craig Robbins.

“The whole concept of a skills marketplace is new to the Department of Defense,” Robbins said. “It’s relatively new to the workforce at large. This idea that you can fulfill numerous roles within an organization with employees that are supporting another team. … GigEagle aligns with the Army People Strategy by enabling the Army to shift from simply distributing personnel to a more deliberate process of managing the talents of our soldiers and civilians.”

Saling noted that all hiring must ultimately support the Army’s core mission: warfighting. That means balancing generalists and specialists to ensure the right expertise is available at the right time.

“The push-pull between the generalists and specialists is: we have, first and foremost, our mission, which is to fight and win our nation’s wars,” Saling said. “What is it we actually need in the Army to do that? … Do we need deep-rooted experts? Do we need people who speak the language and can translate business propositions into the warfighter space?”

Redefining Talent and Modernizing Culture

As warfare becomes increasingly digital, the Army is also rethinking what “military essentiality” means. Cyber and AI conflicts don’t have front lines in the traditional sense, and Saling said that’s changing how the Army assesses and organizes talent.

“We’re looking at those underlying ingredients, those compositions — the things we can figure out from assessments and skills testing,” she said. The service is moving beyond traditional grades and job classifications to include data points like experience, interests and self-directed learning.

Meanwhile, the Army is also trying to modernize its hiring infrastructure and tool adoption, with an emphasis on change management and contextual design.

“It comes down to the experience — we need those who are developing and fielding the technology to provide an experience that meshes with our expectation, both from a technology standpoint and from a decision-making standpoint,” Saling said. “Where those don’t mesh, we need to be doing the hard work of change management and teaching people new ways to do business as we’re integrating these tools.”

Saling emphasized that retaining technologists depends not on messaging or compensation, but on the quality and impact of the work itself.

“The biggest thing that impacts it is not any of our recruiting messages. … It’s the ability to give people a good problem set and let them solve it,” she said. The fastest way to lose a data scientist, she added, is to put them on PowerPoint duty.

Ultimately, the Army’s success in its digital transformation depends on its ability to precisely define talent needs and evolve its personnel systems accordingly.

“As we’re transforming the Army, that’s also a transformation in people,” Saling said. “HR tends to kind of be looked at as a back-office process, but one of the things we’re trying to do out of the [Department of the Army HQ G-1 Personnel Office] is get linked in with all of our tech strategists — everybody who’s working on transformation — and really figure out what that means for our people.”