Pentagon AI Adoption Surges but Stalls Below 50% Amid Promised Gains

Pentagon AI adoption hits ↑ 1,775% growth yet remains under ↓ 43% of workforce

The Department of Defense says its AI rollout is exploding, but fewer than half of its 3.5 million employees are actually using the tools.

CTO Emil Michael told a Hudson Institute gathering that commercial AI users rose from 80,000 in Dec 2025 to 1.5 million this month, a jump that translates to roughly 43 % of the Pentagon’s staff.

“I load the papers, the AI drafts a 200‑hour report in five hours,” Michael said, emphasizing time savings on mandatory congressional submissions.

Those claims echo earlier DefenseScoop remarks that a short‑staffed team produced the “best report in five years” using the internal GenAI.mil platform.

Yet the broader federal picture is uneven. The Office of Management and Budget listed 3,600 AI projects last year, a 70 % rise, but a Brookings study finds five large agencies account for >50 % of all AI inventories, while 11 small agencies contributed just 2 %.

Adoption hurdles echo the private sector: a Goldman Sachs AI Tracker showed only 19.5 % of U.S. firms using AI as of May 2026, and a SAP WalkMe survey revealed that more than half of workers still avoid AI tools.

Privacy watchdogs warn that expanding AI access could expose sensitive data. A recent GAO report urged OMB to issue guidance on privacy safeguards.

For now, the Pentagon touts AI as a bureaucratic antidote, but internal audits remain elusive, and the promised efficiency gains are still under scrutiny.

Read more at Reuters and Bloomberg.

Dispatch from Eleanor Cross (Chief Washington Correspondent).