This AI tool could transform Army maintenance — and maybe more

Terry Gerton You are doing some exciting things at CECOM. We’re going to talk about the Artificial Intelligence Assisted Maintenance tool. What is it and why are you so excited about it?

Nicholaus Saacks I’m very excited about this tool. Artificial Intelligence Assisted Maintenance, we call it AIAM for short, a lot easier to say. It’s a tool; the way we describe it is it digitizes the maintenance process for the Army. So we’re moving away from the large, paper tech manuals or the large PDFs.

Terry Gerton You don’t need a whole wagon to carry all of those mangoes anymore.

Nicholaus Saacks Do you need a whole wagon? It’s saved somewhere in the cloud. And we use the artificial intelligence, or super intelligence, very precisely and surgically in the beginning of the troubleshooting process to get the soldiers and the maintainers to the right part of the manual. So the manual still exists, it’s just in digital format. We’re using AI as their troubleshooting to get them to the right part, and then it walks them through the maintenance process. And what we’re really excited about — recently, we were able to connect this tool to G-Army. So, as the soldiers are doing their troubleshooting or their PMCS or whatever maintenance, when they get to a fault, if they have to order a part, it can connect right to G-Army and it can it can pre-position that parts order so that the supply clerk can go in and just push a button and order the right part.

Terry Gerton And G-Army is the supply system?

Nicholaus Saacks G-Army is the supply system. So in the field, they use G-Army to order the parts and report on the status of the system. If they say a system is non-mission capable, that’ll write to G-Army, so they don’t have to swivel-chair in their process. And then, as they go through the maintenance action to fix the system, they can order the parts they need and the system will reference the tech manual and walk them through all the maintenance procedures. And before they start, it’ll give them what parts we think they’ll need to order based on the maintenance procedure they’re doing. They can go verify that; there’s still a human in the loop so we don’t order a bunch of the wrong parts. But really excited because it’s making that process much smoother and taking some of that cognitive and administrative burden off the soldiers.

Terry Gerton The Communications and Electronics Command is responsible for thousands, thousands upon thousands of end items across the Army, and the tech manuals for that would probably fill this hall. How do you get all of that, plus the practical experience that maintainers have had adjusting those TMs in real time into your AI tool?

Nicholaus Saacks Good question. And it’s really good because if you ask 10 people how many tech manuals we have in the Army, you’re going to get probably 11 different answers. We really don’t know how many we have. And we haven’t done a good job having a singular repository for all the technical manuals. So we’re working right now through the systems that we know are on MTOE, the [Modified Tables of Organization and Equipment]. So we know units are using them because they’re on their authorization lists. And we’re working right now through CECOM and some TACOM tank and automotive equipment, to ingest those manuals. So we’re not just ingesting everything. We’re ingesting those systems we know units are using. And then, as far as the years of maintenance experience, we’ve built the tool with maintenance warrants side by side. So they’re walking the tool and the different workflows it goes through actually mimics — we built the tool around the Army maintenance processes. So it’s the same process they’ve learned. They don’t have to learn how to do maintenance a different way. They do the maintenance the way Army does maintenance. And then this tool supports them in that.

Terry Gerton Do you have to have a Wi-Fi connection to use it?

Nicholaus Saacks Not necessarily Wi-Fi. You need to be connected right now. So in the future roadmap is some sort of a DDIL version where you can maybe download the DDIL, degraded connection environment where maybe you would download what manuals you know you need while you’re disconnected so you have that locally. But right now you have to be on the network, doesn’t have to do Wi-Fi, can be wired in, but it’s a web application. So, you don’t need anything special. You just need — it could be your personal device with Hypori connection. It could be a government-issued tablet or computer. So very hardware-agnostic, but you do need some sort of device and then internet connection today.

Terry Gerton Well, walk us through, then, the maintenance process. A soldier has got a broken radio out in the field, right? And they bring it in, and they’re trying to figure it out. How does this tool fit into that process?

Nicholaus Saacks That’s a really good question. I’ll give you an analogy to explain it. So this is when I knew we were on the right track. So the maintenance process and Q&A very much looks like an LLM screen where like, question and answer. For some reason, I’m considered the technical expert at my house. I don’t have any credentials, but I am. And my mother-in-law, a few months ago, her Peloton wasn’t working. So as the technical expert in the house, the general electrician person, I had to fix it. So as I’m on my phone and I go to Peloton’s help support, and it’s walking me through a very like ChatGPT, like try this, did that work? No, try this. Did that work? No. And I got to a certain point where then it handed me over to a live operator to chat, to try to fix. What I just described that a leading commercial company is doing, that’s exactly what AIAM is doing. So you can go on there, if you’re working on like a JBCP let’s say, and you say the light on my JBC is amber, what does that mean? It’ll kind of scan all the manuals and they’ll give you, this is the problem and would you like to know how to fix it? And then it’ll take you through some steps that an operator can use to try to fix that. And then, if it requires a maintainer then you can hand it off to a maintainer. The maintainer then has the whole chat history with the operator, so they know what the operator’s already done. They can try to do their thing. If they can’t fix it, they can elevate it again. And we have the ability to go all the way up to the LAR, the logistics assistance rep, which is an AMC field representative who’s an expert in that equipment. And that LAR, when they get it, now they don’t have to start from zero. They can see that whole conversation and what’s already been tried and kind of take it from there so they can try to fix the equipment.

Terry Gerton Have you actually deployed this yet? Have you tried it in the field, and what is the response of the soldier?

Nicholaus Saacks Generally, they’re very excited when they see it, and they have a lot of feedback. So the tool started as really just a tool for our LAR workforce to try to mitigate what we saw coming as a decrease in our LAR footprint…we had some downward pressure on the number of LARs we had. So what tools can we give the LARs to make them more effective with fewer resources? And then as we shared it with users, we started building out. There was a demand signal for more workflows and more capability, and we started building out the capability within AIAM, which is how we got into this. It started off as just the maintenance troubleshooting app and it kind of grew into having that PMCS capability. It has a whole dashboard capability where a commander can look at their pacing items and see what’s the readiness status of their pacing items. And there’s a whole bunch of other capability in that dashboard. But that grew out from user demand. So we’re really following the DevSecOps model. Getting in the hands of soldiers, we’ve been out with a number of units. We’ve been out with 4ID and their series of experiments at PCC-6 and taking their feedback to add new features. So a lot of lot of positive feedback from units.

Terry Gerton Are you seeing a change in readiness or a reduction in time to repair?

Nicholaus Saacks I don’t think we’re that far yet to be able to. I would say we’re still kind of in the pilot phase and we aren’t far enough yet to get to that. I think there will be. One of the things I’m excited about, on that dashboard view, if I am a unit commander at whatever echelon, I can look at what my unit’s working on, and it can give me AI insights of, hey, it seems like a lot of your people are troubleshooting or have questions about the JBCP GPS puck. You might want to look at your organizational training on how to do this function of that GPS puck, or things like that. So I think it’s going to help. I think we will get the metrics on the downtime and the meantime to repair. I think that’s going help illuminate other training and maintenance challenges to the units as well.

Terry Gerton Any concern in terms of trustworthiness of feedback from the AI system, from the old warrant officers versus maybe the new younger soldiers?

Nicholaus Saacks There hasn’t — there are always concerns, but the way the system’s built, it uses the technical manuals as the data source it’s searching. It’s not searching the web, so there’s no hallucinations. So it’s referencing the material we put in and there is a feedback loop in the system. There’s a fairly cumbersome process…in the current system, if I have a technical manual and there’s something wrong in the manual, there’s a form I fill out that goes back into the Army enterprise to then filter to the technical writer, to go back down to the technical writer and fix it and then get republished in the new manual. The AIAM has a button you can push and say, there’s something wrong with the manual here; it goes right to the tech writer and then they can just update the XML code and fix the manual in, like, minutes or days instead of weeks or months.

Terry Gerton Wow. What did you learn in the process of putting all of this together? Was it that the tech manuals are great? Was it the LARs are irreplaceable? What were the big lessons?

Nicholaus Saacks  I think one thing I learned and took away — and I kind of came on board at CECOM around the time they were really early piloting this — so I’ve really gotten to see it grow. And one thing I’m super impressed with is the technical curiosity and capability of our workforce. So these aren’t programmers that are building this. Our lead developer is a technical writer who’s curious about coding, so he’s doing all this. He has help, but our lead person is not a coder and they’re making this incredible tool. So the ingenuity and creativeness and the capability of our workforce as they’ve embraced other challenges with us asking them to be more technical savvy and to use low-code, no-code type apps, that’s been incredibly illuminating to me. But I also think…commanders have a lot of problems that they need help with. And I think there’s a lot of value if you can offer them a solution to their problems. So I think through the AIAM tool, we’re bringing them a solution to the maintenance problem and we’re trying to take some of that, like I said, cognitive and administrative burden off of their units so that they have more time to do other stuff, to do warfighting stuff. So I think that’s been really helpful to illuminate that. I think we oftentimes we have a lot of things that we think help, but actually getting it in the hands of soldiers and letting commanders see it — and we’ve engaged with some commanders here this week on the floor already — and letting them see it and you can see the light bulb come on their head like, this helps me, and then how can we use this? I think that’s been really awesome to see.

Terry Gerton Where does it go next? Does it expand throughout CECOM? Does it go to other AMC commands? Does it go Army-wide?

Nicholaus Saacks So, I think it our hope is that it goes Army-wide. You know, we’re doing this on behalf of AMC in coordination with our higher headquarters. And like I said, we have some of the TACOM technical manuals in there, and we’re kind of using focused ones that we know, between us and our TACOM partners, that we know are challenges in the field. And it’s really interesting — there’s a whole technical manual ecosystem that exists from the birth of a technical manual, through its publishing, through its maintenance. And the CECOM team, they’ve really kind of redesigned that whole ecosystem where they can ingest any manual, it can be a commercial manual or it could be an existing Army manual into this ecosystem, and really fool-proof, turn it into a tag-XML manual, which goes into this repository. Then it’s like I said before, the users can do update requests or whatever; we can maintain it really easily. I think we have the capability to offer our program management partners the opportunity where they don’t have to pay; they have tech manuals developed, just give us what you have, we can ingest it very quickly so that when you’re fielding your equipment, there’s some level of technical manual already. Many times, when I go back to my time in the PEO world, PM world, the tech manual was a long pole in the tent of what we used to call transition to sustainment. We can’t sustain this until the unit has a manual that they know how to do maintenance on. And we’re pulling that way back left where pretty close to when they’re doing their first unit equip, they can have some sort of manual to give the units. That’s kind of the vision of where we’re going.