Defense Logistics Agency Pilots Autonomous 'Digital Employees' Strategy
The Defense Logistics Agency is advancing from traditional automation to autonomous 'digital employees' operating 24/7. Governed by Zero Trust architecture and persona-based access controls, DLA aims to pioneer enterprise agentic AI across defense logistics.
The Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) is advancing its digital modernization strategy by moving beyond basic generative AI tools and traditional robotic process automation (RPA) to pilot autonomous AI agents—referred to by agency leadership as "digital employees." Speaking at DLA’s Industry Collider Day, Chief Information Officer Adarryl Roberts detailed the agency's shift toward agentic AI that operates continuously behind the scenes to streamline global supply chain management. Building on a baseline of roughly 190 active bots that saved an estimated 300,000 work hours in 2025, DLA is preparing its 25,000-person military and civilian workforce to transition from simple tool users to active supervisors of autonomous digital personnel.
Deploying fully autonomous software agents inside a combat support agency introduces novel operational, cybersecurity, and cultural governance challenges. To manage these risks, DLA’s AI Center of Excellence is leveraging a foundational Zero Trust cybersecurity framework to implement "persona-based access" controls for software agents. Under this paradigm, an AI agent is assigned digital credentials and access permissions mapped strictly to its specific functional role—such as a procurement specialist limited to procurement and financial data domains. Concurrently, DLA is executing an extensive data cleanup effort to establish a single, authoritative source of truth, ensuring that underlying datasets are free of duplication and errors before agentic models execute enterprise transactions.
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