The Pentagon’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) is partnering with the Department of the Army to rapidly adopt AI-enabled coding tools across the workforce of the Defense Department (DOD) – rebranded as the War Department by the Trump administration.
In a call for solutions document released Feb. 19, officials said the objective is to provide DOD software developers with commercial-grade AI capabilities to accelerate and improve software delivery. The call for solutions seeks to identify “commercially available AI-enabled coding tools and platforms that can be deployed at enterprise scale across the DOD.”
The CDAO will work in coordination with the Department of the Army and the Army Contracting Command – Aberdeen Proving Ground’s Digital Capabilities Contracting Center of Excellence. The Army is the lead organization for the effort.
According to the solicitation, the DOD’s software development workforce “lacks standardized, enterprise-wide access to AI-enabled coding tools that are commonplace in the commercial sector.”
This gap, according to officials, limits developer productivity, slows the delivery of mission-critical software, and “places the department at a disadvantage relative to the pace of innovation in the private sector.”
“These capabilities must be accessible to the department’s developer workforce across diverse computing environments, must operate within the department’s security and compliance framework, and must be deployable at scale to achieve broad adoption,” the notice reads. “The department seeks solutions that minimize time to delivery while maximizing capability and interoperability with existing infrastructure.”
Specifically, the department wants AI-enabled coding capabilities delivered through two primary modalities: integrated development environment (IDE)-based coding assistance and command-line interface (CLI)-based agentic coding.
IDE- based coding assistance refers to AI-powered tools that integrate into existing code editors and provide features such as code completion, generation, inline chat assistance, and AI-driven code review.
CLI-based agentic coding refers to AI-powered tools that operate in terminal environments and are capable of autonomous, multistep coding tasks, including code generation, testing, debugging, refactoring, and deployment workflows, with human oversight.
The call for solutions outlines a multi-phase submission process. Phase 1 requires a high-level solution brief. Selected offerors may be invited to participate in Phase 2, which includes a pitch and possible product demonstration, unless that phase is bypassed. Offerors advancing to Phase 3 will submit a detailed proposal for final evaluation and potential award.
The deadline to submit questions for Phase 1 is 1 p.m. Eastern on Feb. 27. The deadline to submit solution briefs is March 6.
The notice also asks organizations intending to submit a solution brief to notify the contracting office as soon as possible through a Microsoft Forms link.