‘Digital employees’ are coming to the Defense Logistics Agency

The Defense Logistics Agency is piloting AI agents that work autonomously—bots that its CIO calls “digital employees.”

“This is a new frontier for everyone,” DLA chief information officer Adarryl Roberts told reporters at DLA’s Industry Collider Day on Sept. 9 in Alexandria, Va.

The move builds on DLA’s increasing use of robotic process automation, or RPA, and the generative AI tools available to its 25,000 or so military and civilian personnel. In 2025, bots saved DLA an estimated 300,000 hours of work—some working around the clock to help the combat support agency get everything from food and fuel to medical supplies and clothing where it needs to go.

“We have approximately 185 to 190 bots that are running. I’d say about 90% to 95% of those are unattended bots,” Roberts said. “So, we really cracked the nut to have those unattended. Now, we’re moving from the bots to, ‘How can we have agentic agents working across [the department], based upon our data? So, we’re early in that journey.”

Military-specific versions of ChatGPT and Grok recently joined Gemini on the platform that gives defense workers access to generative-AI tools for information that is sensitive but unclassified. DLA gets its workers up to speed on these tools through “GenAI 101 training,” Roberts said.

“I would look at generative AI as the concept of making the workforce and agency—from an operating model—comfortable with the results you’ll get with AI,” he said. Tools like Gemini and ChatGPT “allow the workforce to interact with AI, see the results, trust the results, and get comfortable.” 

“That’s required, because as you move to a more agentic AI, those agents are working 24/7 behind the scenes, and so there has to be a level—a cultural level—of trust in those outcomes,” he said. “Now, we’re shifting to what I would call strategic implementation in terms of those agentic agents to get us better results.”

Roberts said introducing digital employees will require new management strategies. Humans will be working alongside—and often overseeing—digital agents, creating an assortment of new management challenges.

“I think we like to call it, ‘How are we managing our digital employees?” Roberts posited. “Because that’s what they really are, and how do you manage them in conjunction with your human employees?” How do you train a workforce to where everyone is essentially working as a supervisor because of the employment of AI with humans? Do you terminate an agent because of the performance?”

“So, it’s a very complex universe, from an employee-cultural perspective, in terms of how you deploy and manage those agents,” Roberts said.

It might sound like science fiction, but the rapid evolution of AI—and DLA’s gradual adoption of it—creates questions around governance, rules, security, and the performance of AI agents and even human employees. 

Many of these questions fall to DLA’s AI Center of Excellence, founded in 2024 to ensure the safe, secure, and responsible integration of AI across the agency. The center oversees DLA’s use of AI and performs other functions, like ensuring agents are being trained properly. DLA has implemented a zero-trust cybersecurity framework that Roberts called “foundational” to high-level agentic work.

Currently, the agency is establishing “persona-based access” that will dictate AI agents’ account permissions based on their job descriptions. For example, a procurement specialist at DLA may require access to certain data domains, like procurement and financial data, so a digital agent performing the same procurement specialist duties should have permission to access only those same data domains.

“These AI agents should have a persona, just like a person,” Roberts said.

DLA is also working to clean up its datasets.

“How do we create a single source of truth for DLA and our stakeholders in terms of our data, making sure it’s a gold standard, meaning we remove the duplicity, errors, etc…so the data is in a usable state, not just for analytics and AI, but as we look toward future system sustainability,” Roberts said.

‘AI is the new gunpowder’

DLA accelerated its use of AI during the 32-month tenure of Director Lt. Gen. Mark Simerly, who will retire on Oct. 2. Simerly will be replaced by a familiar face at DLA, Air Force Lt. Gen. David Sanford, who spent the past two years as director of Logistics Operations and commander, Joint Regional Combat Support.

Speaking at the Sept. 9 event, Simerly said technology allows DLA to be predictive and proactive in solving problems, and he views AI as the key ingredient to solving them at scale.

“I believe when it comes to military logistics, AI is the new gunpowder,” he told reporters. “And we don’t think it’s just an explosive, destructive capability, although we know it can be. It can also be very productive.”

Simerly’s philosophy at DLA has been “to move at pace with the commercial world,” adopting and adapting capabilities rapidly, establish the proper network and infrastructure to access and manage agency data suitably, “and then allow interoperability between the services and with industry to allow us to truly operate end-to-end supply chain operations that are optimized.”

A legacy of change

Simerly said changes at his agency were spurred by the war in Ukraine, which expanded in February 2022, and even during the seven-month-old war on Iran launched by President Donald Trump.

“I think probably the greatest change that I’ve seen in the agency is a willingness to change within the agency. This recognition that we have to respond to the changing environment, that we have to respond to the changing technology, and that we’ve got a responsibility to change as rapidly as we can, so we can continue to be relevant and offer support to the warfighters,” he said. “I would say that we were built to change from the very beginning. We’ve had to accelerate that change cycle in the last few years, and I’ve seen the willingness and the readiness of the agency to take that challenge on and to operationalize our transformation planning into tangible outcomes.”

The contested logistics in Ukraine captured his attention because they were so different from previous U.S. military conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, where DLA delivered food and fuel to forward operating bases “really without great resistance.”

“That would never take place in a place like Ukraine, in the way that they’re operating, the way they have to disperse, the way that the lines of communications are contested and where everything has to be done in a certain way,” Simerly said.

“What sort of sparked some of the transformation energy was very much awareness of what was taking place and being illustrated on that battlefield in Ukraine about the things that we no longer could rely upon, like the air and domain dominance that we possessed in previous fights that is now no longer valid or in place.”

Simerly said similar conditions pertain in the U.S. war on Iran.

“There’s no question that we’re learning the same lessons now in Operation Epic Fury with Iran and their ability to target a broader array of things with precision that puts much more at risk, and you know certainly we’re learning a lot about the execution of alternate supply chains, alternate supply means, and the necessity of being able to operate with precision,” he said.

Simerly expressed pride in his DLA team.

“I think about throughout my career the winning teams that I’ve been privileged to be part of, and that’s what I’m proud of here,” he said. “The winning team that I’m part of now, that will continue on the mission after I leave.”