After refining its approach to software development, the U.S. Army announced it has rebooted its Accessions Information Environment (AIE) system to “AIE 2.0” in an effort to transform the Army recruiting process.
AIE is a system used by recruiters to enlist soldiers in the Army. The reimagined AIE 2.0 aims to help recruiters spend less time behind a desk and more time connecting with potential recruits.
Recruiters will be able to generate and manage leads in a mobile app, easily connect with potential recruits, streamline paperwork, and replace paper processes with electronic ones.
“AIE will enhance prospecting, processing, and future soldier management,” said Brig. Gen. Fred Hockett Jr., deputy commanding general-support for the U.S. Army Recruiting Command (USAREC).
AIE needs “to be intuitive,” Hockett added. “We don’t want to spend 80 hours training somebody how to operate a system.”
AIE 2.0 reflects the Army’s guidance and industry best practices documented in Army Directive 2024-02 – a policy memo the Army published in March. The AIE 2.0 reboot includes a focus on agile best practices and Salesforce out-of-the-box capabilities.
The Army said it will award a 10-year, multi-award, indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract for AIE 2.0.
“Instead of giving one big contract to an integrator to do everything, we disaggregated our approach,” said Col. Matthew Paul, project manager for the Integrated Personnel and Pay System – Army (IPPS-A). “We have a direct contractual relationship with Salesforce. We are pivoting into a multi-vendor environment and to an Agile, continuous integration, continuous deployment methodology.”
“We are going to onboard multiple vendors that can meet our requirements, and those industry partners are going to compete at the task-order level,” he added.
Paul explained that the Army is not buying specific products, but it is buying “capacity that is capable of going fast in a Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe® 6.0) model.”
The Army plans to deploy an initial AIE 2.0 capability to the Ohio Army National Guard Recruiting and Retention Battalion. AIE 2.0 will eventually support over 25,000 users at the Army Cadet Command, Army Center for Initial Military Training, Army Enterprise Marketing Office, Army National Guard, and USAREC.
