The Department of the Navy (DON) has deployed its new “DON GPT” AI tool for trial use by the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps.
A Navy spokesperson told MeriTalk that the tool is “newly accredited and deployed” in the Navy’s Flank Speed cloud service as of the second quarter of fiscal year 2025. Flank Speed is the Navy’s Impact Level 5 (IL5) unclassified Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365 (M365) cloud implementation.
For now, the spokesperson confirmed that DON GPT is just for internal use.
Jacob Glassman – senior technical advisor to the Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development, and Acquisition – said he helped deploy the tool in partnership with the Navy CIO Office.
“DON GPT. Okay, what’s so unique about that? Well, it is hosted in our Flank Speed enterprise environment, which means IL5, and it’s capable of moving up to IL6,” Glassman said during GovCIO’s AI FedLab event in Reston, Va., on May 13.
Glassman explained that the deployment strategy was “to start small and scale rapidly.”
“What we did is we said, ‘Okay, what is the infrastructure we need to demonstrate what AI can do from an enterprise solution?’ So, again, working with the CIO Office, this was IL5 – so that was very, very unique amongst a lot of AI capabilities that were deployed out – and IL6,” Glassman said. “It’s now in our enterprise system. So, we can scale to every single person in the Navy and Marine Corps if we needed to.”
Glassman described initial “alpha trials” in which DON GPT was distributed to a wide range of users without strict guidelines. Instead, they were encouraged to “just use it.”
He selected personnel from various functional areas – including acquisition, engineering, and legal – for a 45-day trial, followed by a simple feedback survey.
“That’s done two things. One, it has uncovered a bunch of use cases that we didn’t really think about, because these are the actual people doing the work, right? These are the people actually doing the job, and they’re using this tool to make their job better in a certain area,” Glassman said.
“But the other really impressive part of it, to me, was that the journey can be more enlightening than the destination. So, culturally changing a place like the Department of Defense to start utilizing AI tools when we have all these rigid processes and things we’ve been doing for years and years … now, all of a sudden, instead of just throwing it at them, you now have champions. You now have advocates,” he added.
“Because they actually gave the feedback, and they [told] us, ‘Hey, we tried it in this use case … turns out it took me twice as long and it was a total mess. But I had no idea that would be so valuable here,’” Glassman explained. “So, it did cultural and also gave us that feedback. It was really impressive.”
DON GPT’s rollout follows a broader trend among Federal agencies developing internal AI tools. The Department of the Air Force, for example, has deployed its own NIPRGPT chatbot.
Additionally, GSAi has rolled out at the General Services Administration, StateChat at the State Department, and DHSChat at the Department of Homeland Security.