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Optimizing Decision Making with Seekr’s COA Tools

With increasing demand for shipbuilding by the Navy, trustworthy AI supports operational readiness with streamlined multidisciplinary analysis and timely recommendations about overcoming delays, costly overruns and a shrinking industrial base. As the Navy seeks new ways to meet shipbuilding goals, Seekr’s Course of Action (COA) Generation tools respond with fit-for-purpose AI agents that bring domains of data together with hyperefficiency to support business decisions with clarity and agility, in conformity with Department of the Navy (DoN) doctrine and practice for decision support.

This aligns to the strategic insights of Alfred Thayer Mahan and others who envisioned a strong Blue Water Navy as the cornerstone of American global influence. In alignment with this vision, investment to modernize shipbuilding should be coupled with those in manpower, with a boost from AI agents for COA generation, to drive fleet readiness, operational agility and decision advantage in our increasingly competitive global maritime environment.

The OBBBA and the Navy

The recent One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) has awarded $26.5 billion for Navy shipbuilding to support both acquisition of diverse classes of ships and operational enhancement to assist the workforce driving and managing new shipbuilding projects. OBBBA therefore establishes a new set of decisions within and across acquisition and operational activities, but AI is required to support and link these decisions to match the speed and scale of the Navy’s shipbuilding demand signal.

To maintain pace with new capacity expectations, the Navy must apply funding to the workforce and acquisition processes in concert. Adding in AI to this combination can bring multidisciplinary expertise to the equation, enabling a new class of strategic decisions such as:

  1. Understanding the capacity of the available workforce and of physical infrastructure to plan out engineering-heavy tasks in detail, in the optimal sequence
  2. Auto-validating alignment and optimization of proposed project portfolios to strategic guidance (National Defense Strategy, Industrial Policy, Navy Shipbuilding Plan, etc.)
  3. Running front-end risk analysis per production line to weigh all modernization investments and classify projects from “best-bang-for-the-buck” to the “as-is is good enough”
  4. Adding sufficient lead time to project plans for hands-on AI training to accelerate operations
  5. Executing acquisition, operational and technical authorities using AI agents, gaining system feedback, and developing agile strategies to align authorities to remove blockers

Using AI to run complex analyses for these planning decisions may feel unnatural at first. As with any new habit, most benefits do not show up right away, but only as the Government begins to better understand the shipbuilding capacity and the Fleet it is purchasing. They pivot is bullet 5, where this new understanding is operationalized through AI agents executing existing authorities.

Operational Readiness with SeekrFlow

Seekr believes generative AI (GenAI) is the essential technical capability to realizing this vision. Seekr’s COA Generation tools use GenAI agents to deliver this level of decision support, leading to mastery of increasingly complex decisions about not only shipbuilding but weapon systems integration, material and logistics planning and workforce optimization. GenAI enables this by offloading cognitive tasks from humans, while aligning more data and expertise to key decision points within the Navy’s broader culture and each component’s way of making decisions.

COA generation is a longstanding part of Navy decision analysis and operations research culture. Seekr enhances these proven disciplines and lessons learned with our SeekrFlow AI platform, which enables users to collect and organize diverse data with hyperefficiency and to align AI agents to each authority and discipline with responsibility for informing or making decisions. SeekrFlow then connects common elements from these diverse domains while surfacing outliers and anomalies into consistent COA data packages for careful attention by decision makers. In doing so, SeekrFlow harnesses GenAI’s capabilities for data acquisition at an unprecedented speed to increase decision agility, organization coherence and readiness for operators and executives.

Increasing Workforce and Decision Capacity with AI Agents

With ship production set to increase, there is not sufficient corresponding growth in manpower to oversee and manage shipbuilding activities and make the myriad decisions required to maintain cost, schedule and performance objectives. Add in recent departures from Civilian service, and picture gets muddier. AI agents can help fill the workforce capacity gap, taking on various tasks to enable Navy military, civilian and contractor staffs in acquisition and operations to work in concert to achieve readiness in a timely manner to keep production on budget and on schedule.

A fundamental challenge with most large production and modernization efforts tends to be unaccountable dependencies, meaning, people and processes outside the direct control of the program manager are the root causes of myriad delays. Recent Navy efforts involving Driver Trees got after this problem, making significant progress to surface these unaccountable dependencies. Seekr AI agents extend progress like this by generating COAs to support key shipbuilding decisions to aid Navy staffs working in stove-piped legacy systems. We use our SeekrFlow AI development platform to ingest authoritative documentation and quantitative inputs, set up agentic workflows to synchronize inputs for decision-making and collapse procedural bottlenecks. It augments the capacity of project engineers, budget planners, system operators and program managers to bring data together at the point of decision. This creates a sustained demand signal—powered by AI tooling—to identify unaccountable dependencies early and probe their root causes. From there, AI agents become part of the solution by generating concise COAs informed by expert judgment, in-depth risk analysis and detailed action plans.

Optimizing Decision Making with Agentic COA Generation

Decision-making processes like these must add significant value to justify a change in behavior. Agentic COA generation hits the mark by augmenting value-focused decision-making traditions with cognitive offloading to AI agents, hyper efficient information processing and dramatic time savings for executives who can leverage their vast experience and intuition with far fewer delays. Seekr’s COA Generation enhances traditional military planning methodologies through the training of fit-for-purpose AI agents with embedded expertise that SeekrFlow combines to produce strategic insights that executives need. Seekr AI can deploy in cloud and the multicloud, uniting information from a variety of disconnected operating environments. This time savings strategy brings domain knowledge to decision points to accelerate decision processes by 60% or more.

For shipbuilding acquisition decisions, SeekrFlow can review CDRLS, surface project risks, forecast anticipated outcomes to lower-level project delays and standardize reporting. It can also automate complex procedures involving large varieties and volumes of data, building on legacy analytic tools to run more ‘what if’ scenarios to support richer recommendations. Agents in SeekrFlow can also connect and compare workflows across the organization and across services to identify critical dependencies, so that systems stay on track with warfighting objectives.

Seekr’s COA Generation agents, developing using SeekrFlow, can also begin with requirements and reverse-engineer the procedures that teams can take reach objectives on time and on schedule. This approach to COA generation introduces multiple pathways to acceptable outcomes and plots key decisions along the way. In this and other scenarios, senior leaders are required to define that is most valuable to them and what decision criteria they expect to guide the process. AI agents add an alignment function to guide the workforce to act with clarity, responsibility, accountability and authority in their support of past, present and future decisions.

An Ally to the Navy and MOCs

Seekr has invested significantly to align the framework described in Seekr’s COA Generation eBook to Navy guidance, with special emphasis on supporting acquisition and operational communities. The Seekr Government team brings decades of prior experience supporting and working alongside these groups. Seekr’s and engagements with Navy leaders and proactive presence at Navy industry events in recent years has informed our AI investments. Our recent strategic investment by chipmaker AMD and alliances with Oracle, NVIDIA and Intel enable Seekr to deploy our GPU supercluster computing resources for COA generation at scale to support large DoD problems.

Agentic COA generation at scale enables realignment of long- and short-term efforts for any situation. Hyper efficiently marshaling expertise that is currently locked in stove-piped systems, processes and organizations is a long-awaited game-changer for COAs connecting operations to acquisitions. For network operations involving IP telemetry, inserting COA Generation can reduce cybersecurity vulnerabilities and improve the resilience and availability of Navy enterprise network operations. Also, Seekr offers operational capabilities to scale independent verification and validation (IV&V) of AI models before they are adopted to IP networks. This empowers program managers to root out AI hallucinations and biases before adoption while driving operational alignment to Federal regulations, Navy CTO World-class Alignment Metrics (WAMs) and various services management and governance frameworks.

This also unlocks strategic opportunities for the Navy’s new AI strategy. For example, agentic COA Generation can better align Navy maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) decisions to Maritime Operations Centers (MOCs) data to expand tradespace with shared situational awareness. Ship maintenance decisions within this strategic frame of reference can inform Navy shipbuilding while being informed by MOC-level COAs fed by operational data. This level of COA-driven strategic thinking is intuitive, connected, and commensurate to the high-end threat we all face today.

OBBBA funding opens the door for the Navy to think differently while leveraging hard-won lessons. By transforming legacy shipbuilding decisions into an AI-enabled COA generation ecosystem, the Navy will enhance its shipbuilding capacity. The Fleet must remain technologically advanced, resilient and ready to compete at the highest level. To do that, the Navy can supercharge investments in shipbuilding capacity with increased investments to manpower augmented by AI agents. Seekr provides the best option to do so the critical domain of COA generation to link operational and acquisition decisions for the rough waters that appear long ahead of us all.

To learn more about SeekrFlow and other COA Generation tools, visit Seekr’s Carahsoft page.

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