The US Army is piloting an AI tool that lets soldiers search digitised repair manuals, log faults and order parts from a phone or laptop, and says about 4,000 users have given feedback so far.
The Artificial Intelligence-Assisted Maintenance (AIAM) programme, run by the Army’s Communications-Electronics Command (CECOM), moves paper technical manuals onto a web app used in unit motor pools. Soldiers can ask repair questions, pass unresolved problems to civilian logistics assistance representatives by chat or video, and check parts stock in the Army’s logistics system, GCSS-Army.
A CECOM spokesperson told DefenseScoop on 20 October that 200 to 250 technical manuals had been digitised, out of the thousands the Army wants to cover. Col. Cory Armstead, of CECOM’s Integrated Logistics Support Center, was candid about early versions, which in effect attached a manual to an AI model: “we’re getting a lot of hallucinations,” he said.
An earlier version was demonstrated to the 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, at the National Training Center in California, according to an Army article in July. The Army has not published figures on repair time saved. It plans to add predictive maintenance later.