- 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.
