Within just a few months, the country’s largest military shipbuilder aims to have its shipyard employees taking direction from AI.
“By the end of this year, our plan is to have every single person in our manufacturing shops—17 different businesses, basically across 550 acres—doing work based on the output of what AI tells us to go do. At the end of [2026] all of the people working on all of our ships will be directed by what AI tells us to do,” Brian Fields, the chief technology officer for HII’s Newport News Shipbuilding division, said at C3 AI’s federal event on Tuesday. “So we're jumping in the deep end of the pool… If we don't do something rapidly, we are not going to supply the Navy with the ships they need.”
HII, which has been leaning into emerging technologies, inked a deal with C3 AI earlier this year to use agentic AI, which uses automation to learn and make decisions once given specific goals, to help the shipbuilder meet its goals of a 20-percent increase in production.
“We have 17 different shops: 2,300 people. They have to do 5,200 jobs a week, and each one of those jobs has 32 different data sources. So you're talking hundreds of thousands of decisions…to be made by about 100 people in spreadsheets. The results you have are really built on the process you have. And we need a new process,” Fields said.
The push for using AI in shipbuilding comes as the White House and Navy leaders demand faster production times for nuclear-capable submarines.
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