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Aug 15 2025
Software

TechNet Augusta: Rapid App Development and Other Army Priorities

Learn what’s on the agenda for the week, including low-code, data-centric operations.

The Army will be looking for ways to replatform legacy applications and speed time to delivery on a tighter budget and with fewer people when it kicks off the 2025 AFCEA TechNet Augusta Conference and Expo Monday.

Solving these challenges will enable the Army to improve its communications in remote areas, troop welfare, logistics, supply chain, maintenance and equipment, and situational awareness.

The branch already invested in the Army Enterprise Service Management Platform and is beginning to incorporate software and hardware asset management through ServiceNow’s technology stack.

“CDW has helped with a lot of the asset management pieces as a subcontractor,” says Jay Pasquesi, Army enterprise client executive at CDW Government. “Other elements of the Army are looking at how hardware is being utilized, how software is being utilized, so if they're spending a lot of money on a piece of software they want to divest from, they can harvest that savings and reinvest it in some other innovation.”

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Data-Centric Low-Code and No-Code Operations

The Army can already make informed software spending decisions because battlefield data is being ingested into the ServiceNow platform, the licensing for which it obtained inexpensively through an enterprise agreement.

At TechNet Augusta, CDW Government will make the case for allowing Army warfighters to use ServiceNow’s App Engine to rapidly develop and deploy critical apps, says Keith Demma, ServiceNow principal field solution architect at CDW Government.

Currently, it can take an Army component as long as two years to request a new workflow, run it up the chain of command, build a set of requirements and put it up for bid. By then, the mission and even the administration may have changed.

ServiceNow App Engine would bring data-centric, low-code and no-code operations to the Army.

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“They can jump in, develop something and show their command, ‘Hey, here’s a quick way to solve this problem,’” Demma says. “It's still secure, it still interfaces with all the integrations and databases we need to, and we can deploy it rapidly in the next 45 days.”

CDW Government already built a detail kit, essentially ServiceNow in a box, with computing, cybersecurity and wireless baked in for disconnected Navy ships. Sailors in denied, disrupted, intermittent and limited (DDIL) environments use it to build low-code apps.

“You're saving money on building applications, you're ingesting data quicker,” Pasquesi says. “Then, the trend we’re seeing is leveraging artificial intelligence to process that data, to enhance the speed of the automated workflows and the outcomes.”

Keith Demma
You’re down people. Your budgets have been cut. Nobody’s coming to save you and nobody cares.”

Keith Demma ServiceNow Principal Field Solution Architect, CDW Government

How Agentic AI Will Transform Army Operations

The Department of Defense is running a $200 million ChatGPT pilot with OpenAI that is expected to explore agentic AI.

Yet most of the government’s AI conversations remain centered on the Department of Government Efficiency’s efforts to refactor and modernize legacy coding languages such as COBOL to get off mainframes, says Joel Krooswyk, former federal CTO at GitLab.

AI agents are far more context-aware and will have a better idea than developers of which projects are impacting a particular app, allowing for better orchestration of refactoring.

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“That ‘keep the lights on’ stuff that’s eating 50% of our time?” Krooswyk asks. “We, for the first time ever, have a shot at actually getting rid of this stuff.”

Agentic AI will certainly be a buzzword at TechNet Augusta, and its longer-term impacts on Army operations will likely be discussed, such as eliminating the manual work around marking targets and clearing areas in war zones. That work currently takes a human hours or days to examine all possible routes for threats.

“Agentic AI can do it in minutes,” Demma says. “It still has to be validated, obviously, but agentic AI will do all of the background research for you very quickly.”

LEARN MORE: Agencies must be proactive in protecting data from artificial intelligence threats.

Realizing Next-Generation Command and Control

Other TechNet Augusta priorities for the Army include topics such as network resilience, survivability in contested environments and seamless data integration from the battlefield to mission command. Once the data is all in one place, AI can process it for digital overmatch on the battlefield. But that’s easier said than done.

“Right now, there are too many stovepipes and systems that don’t talk well,” Pasquesi says.

The Army needs application programming interfaces, apps, data and network layers seamlessly integrated to fully realize next-generation command and control, he says.

Also on the TechNet Augusta agenda are discussions about modernizing the Army enterprise to save money, incorporate AI into cyberthreat hunting and how to take advantage of automation.

“You’re down people. Your budgets have been cut. Nobody’s coming to save you and nobody cares,” Demma says. “The biggest thing right now is finding ways to help in lieu of all of the reduction and slimming down of resources.”

To learn more about TechNet Augusta, visit our conference page. You can also follow us on the social platform X at @FedTechMagazine to see behind-the-scenes moments.

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