Forget everything we’ve said about logistics being the unsexy domain of defense. We’re quickly leaving the days of pens, paper, whiteboards, and spreadsheets behind us and putting AI agents in the game.
Today, logistics and sustainment software startup Rune rolled out Saga, a frontline AI agent inside its flagship military logistics platform designed for reconstitution, the process of restoring a force to combat effectiveness.
Battle bot: In case you’ve been living in a cave, AI agents—little bots inside AI models capable of autonomously performing tasks on behalf of a user or system—are all the rage right now.
In the civilian world, use cases include booking flights, writing code, and sending emails, but Rune wants to bring them into the battlefield with Saga, its agent built into TyrOS.
A bit more on TyrOS:
- The platform uses AI to process masses of data to track and predictively allocate resources more quickly and accurately than the spreadsheets, whiteboards, or pen-and-paper logisticians are often forced to use, especially in operational environments.
- It’s designed to run across domains and on low-connectivity edge devices. Since Saga lives inside TyrOS, it’s also built for denied, degraded, intermittent, or latent (DDIL) network conditions and runs on those same devices.
- TyrOS was also tapped as the logistics software layer for both Lockheed and Anduril’s Next Generation Command and Control (NGC2) prototype efforts.
In the loop: Importantly, neither TyrOS nor Saga is designed to take humans out of the loop entirely: “We’re just providing them with the most concise information and set of recommendations for them to use their human judgment to make the final call,” Rune co-founder and CTO Peter Goldsborough told Tectonic.
When that decision is made, Saga takes the next steps to execute it—whether that’s scheduling distribution operations, allocating resources, requesting supplies or assistance, ordering troop movements, or any other number of previously manual tasks logisticians and commanders are responsible for—while checking with the user each step along the way.
Easy peasy: Another goal with Saga is to make interacting with TyrOS as intuitive and adaptable as possible for users in the field by introducing new input and interface options.
Instead of typing out a prompt into a laptop, which “you probably don’t have time to [do] in the battlefield,” users can use voice commands with Saga.
“You probably have enough time to say, ‘Hey, I’m getting shot at right now. I need ‘X,’ I have two wounded soldiers, and I need to be evacuated,” Goldsborough said. “That speech can automatically translate into inputs TyrOS can understand,”
Another is by automating maintenance workflows. “If I’m a maintainer, I know what I’m doing, and I shouldn’t have to type in a prompt,” he said. With Saga, “I can click [a task], and based on all the context of what I’m doing, get immediate recommendations on the problem I’m solving.”
According to Goldsborough, Saga’s been in the works since last summer, has been tested with customers along the way, and is already integrated into TyrOS “as a product for the last few months—we’re actually using it live with one of our customers right now.”