Inside the Navy’s strategic pursuit to prototype and deploy genAI at scale

After an informative 45-day trial run, the Department of the Navy is getting set to expand its rollout of emerging AI capabilities for sailors, Marines and civilians to speedily adopt in support of their daily operations — via its new DoN GPT tool.

“This is a new way for us on how to rapidly innovate and rapidly prototype,” Jacob Glassman, who serves as senior technical advisor to the assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition, told DefenseScoop.

Glassman and Dr. Raj Dasgupta, a research scientist at the Naval Research Laboratory’s Distributed Intelligent Systems Section, shared new details Wednesday about the sea service’s ongoing pursuits developing and deploying AI, during an SNG Live event hosted by Scoop News Group.

“As we all know over the last, what, three years now, [generative AI] has been the main gamechanger in the field of AI. The Navy and our lab also have been able to use genAI techniques,” Dasgupta said.

GenAI encompasses the field of still-maturing technologies that can process huge volumes of data and perform increasingly “intelligent” tasks — like recognizing speech or producing human-like media and code based on human prompts. 

These capabilities are pushing the boundaries of what existing tech can achieve. Still, according to Glassman, the Navy has historically “struggled with AI adoption.”

Glassman and his team produced DoN GPT to ultimately help resolve some of the challenges causing that struggle. It’s essentially an enterprise-level offering that is hosted and deploys AI capabilities in the Navy’s Flank Speed cloud service, which is an enterprise Microsoft 365 environment that currently hosts unclassified but sensitive information at Impact Level 5, or IL5.

“All the technical people out there know that that’s really, really important for us. So that enables us to scale, but also enables us to reach every single enterprise user in the Navy and Marine Corps,” Glassman said.

The team hosted “alpha trials” over the course of 45 days to identify the best AI use cases to unleash DoN GPT with a beginning subset of the workforce.

“My favorite part of this was our demo to the [assistant] secretary [of the Navy]. No PowerPoint, none of the ‘here’s a big white paper.’ I pulled it up and we had trained and re-tuned it with all of our acquisition strategies over the past, like, 12 years or something. And I had it prompted in — I said, ‘I need an acquisition strategy on a program with sharks with freaking laser beams attached to their heads [a reference to a line in an Austin Powers movie] and an OV-1 [High Level Operational Concept Graphic],’ and it cranks it out right there. Now, there’s misspellings and you’re always going to have the rock throwers [but] I did that in five minutes — and with just me, right?” Glassman explained. “So those are the kind of things we’re seeing” in terms of use cases.

That accelerated trial period allowed DoN GPT’s makers to identify bugs that they typically wouldn’t find until years after launching an enterprise service, in his view. 

It also unfolded at the same time when the Pentagon and its components were offering options to incentivize more than 50,000 civilian personnel to retire early or resign, as part of a major campaign from the Trump administration to cut the federal workforce and what current leaders view as wasteful spending.

“AI can absolutely dramatically improve this. Why do I need three or four full-time equivalents in a program office to generate an acquisition strategy when DoN GPT may be able to do it with one person in the course of a week?” Glassman said.

So far, he noted, the entire Navy has lost about 10% of its civilian staff in the government’s ongoing workforce reduction effort. 

“Now, the Navy and Marine Corps have a large workforce — but definitely in our contracting officer points, our business financial management and within our program management teams, it’s really, really significant. So, this capability will not replace them. AI does not replace people, but it augments the remaining force enough to mitigate [some of] that” strain, Glassman said.

Now, his team is “gearing up” for DoN GPT’s next “beta trials” of piloting.

“I’m actually briefing the [assistant] secretary later today about that,” Glassman told DefenseScoop, referring to acting Assistant Secretary of the Navy Brett Seidle.

Beyond this nascent tool, inside the Naval Research Laboratory, scientists and experts are studying and applying AI across a wide variety of use cases. 

Some, according to Dasgupta, are associated with reinforcement learning, attack simulations like through red-teaming and blue-teaming, large language models and even large reasoning models, which go further than text generation and can reveal more about systems’ thinking processes.

They are also working to help the Navy confront and counter risks that accompany applications of genAI.

“We want [the workforce] to use tools like DoN GPT and genAI, but we also want to give them a feel of what the risks of genAI are. So essentially, we are looking at tools that will take genAI and it will output the output of the genAI, plus what the risks of that output is going to be, so that the end user — like the fleet or the sailor — they have a good idea of what the risks could be of using that,” Dasgupta told DefenseScoop.

Updated on June 12, 2025, at 9:45 AM: This story has been updated to clarify that Jacob Glassman planned to brief acting Assistant Secretary of the Navy Brett Seidle, not Secretary of the Navy John Phelan.