Streamlining Military Personal and Equipment Readiness

Every year, the United States Department of Defense (DoD) allocates billions of dollars and millions of training hours to equipment and personnel readiness. Personal and equipment readiness refer to the various tasks and checkpoints that U.S. military forces are expected to have prepared and passed at any given moment. Personal readiness includes job-specific training, medical clearances, recruitment targets and compliance requirements. Equipment readiness requires experienced maintainers as well as knowledge and assessment of equipment age and condition. Personal and equipment readiness together determine how effectively and quickly United States forces could respond if needed.

If all of that sounds like a headache to keep track of across all the personnel and equipment funded by the military’s $146 billion annual budget, that’s because it is. An incredible amount of time, energy and money is spent trying to keep everything and everyone ready to go at a moment’s notice.

“Anyone who has worked in a professional environment understands the struggle of trying to meet your mandatory training requirements while completing your usual duties, and that problem is only exacerbated in the military, where missing training credentials creates a massive readiness issue,” said Max Weintraub, senior program manager at the National Security Innovation Network (NSIN).

Now, a startup created by a trio of Duke graduates is trying to solve these problems with the help of AI. Called “EZTrain,” the company has secured a series of startup grants from the DoD worth $125,000 and is poised to become a regular feature across several branches of the military.

But it all started with a single applied entrepreneurship class held by Duke Engineering in 2020. Called “Mission Driven Startups,” the class is part of a national program called “Hacking for Defense” that is sponsored by NSIN. The program assigns DoD problems to universities across the country and challenges them to use “Lean Startup” methodology to develop solutions.

The founders of EZTrain—Luke Sommer (Public Policy ‘21), Roberto Medrano (Public Policy ‘21) and Thomas Chemmanoor (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science ‘22)—were first approached by the Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in Goldsboro, North Carolina. The problem that the team was given to tackle was Air Force training inefficiency.

“What the DoD needs is tools that more efficiently leverage their time and money investment, and that’s where EZTrain comes in. We’re here to save them time and money and make sure that their operations are as efficient as possible.”

Roberto Medrano
Duke Public Policy ’21

Over the course of the semester, the EZTrain team conducted hundreds of interviews and visited the base multiple times to nail down the cause of this training inefficiency and readiness crisis.

“Through our interviews and time spent on the base, we found that up to a third of these training sessions were unutilized because people didn’t have clear instructions and there weren’t formal communication streams,” Sommer said. “A lot of the technology to support readiness management was completely outdated, so that was the root cause of a lot of the issues that we found.”

The team’s solution was an AI copilot tool specifically for readiness management. They created a minimum viable product (MVP) that would take in readiness data, compile it, and disseminate it to the right people. EZTrain uses unstructured data ingestion and user-prompted automation to save supervisors hours that they would typically spend manually parsing data. The program uses this data to create individualized training orders. EZTrain can also provide leadership with a predictive model of their unit’s readiness using training data analysis. Over 30,000 individualized training orders have been sent out and over 15,000 training tasks have been completed within the EZTrain system.

Since 2020, the EZTrain system has found utility far beyond the Seymour Johnson Air Force Base. Over a three-year period, the EZTrain team spoke to over 300 first responders, including military personnel, firefighters and EMTs, who expressed that they rely on specialized training to do their life-saving work, but the current training management methods are time consuming and error prone. These inefficiencies lead supervisors to spend more time on administrative work, which results in poor training plans and poor training outcomes. This results in wasted time and money—something EZTrain seeks to resolve.

“What the DoD needs is tools that more efficiently leverage their time and money investment, and that’s where EZTrain comes in,” Medrano said. “We’re here to save them time and money and make sure that their operations are as efficient as possible.”

In April 2021, EZTrain won a $50K AFWERX Small Business Technology Transfer grant in partnership with Duke University to focus on modernizing readiness management. The team also ran a study at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base that showed using EZTrain reduced readiness management time by 90% and increased task completion by 11%.

In 2022, The EZTrain team participated in the Duke Innovation Studio accelerator program powered by Navi. Navi, another company that originated at Duke, develops digital workflow technology for managing entrepreneurship cohort coaching. Their solutions help people and organizations learn innovation skills, solve mission critical problems and bring new ideas to life. The Duke Innovation Studio accelerator program connects student founders to resources and mentors. EZTrain was connected with Nic Meliones, co-founder and CEO of Navi, who graduated from Duke in 2011 with a degree in economics. Meliones has been working with the EZTrain team ever since.

“Finding a hair-on-fire problem is the golden ticket when it comes to startups, and EZTrain leaned into this in a really big way by participating in a tremendous Duke and NSIN program to find problems that matter to the defense ecosystem,” Meliones said. “They’ve coupled this critical problem with something that is expansive, not something that is localized to one small niche area.”

In December 2023, EZTrain won a second AFWERX grant through the Small Business Innovation Research program for $75K with an emphasis on streamlining mass communications in the Air Force. The team also recently generated their first enterprise sale.

“Finding a hair-on-fire problem is the golden ticket when it comes to startups, and EZTrain leaned into this in a really big way by participating in a tremendous Duke and NSIN program to find problems that matter to the defense ecosystem.”

Nic Meliones
CEO of Navi

“We always emphasize the importance of addressing the major assumptions of an idea as early as possible,” Meliones said. “Through tons of user interviews, validating their product with early adopters, and earning access to incredible opportunities—such as accelerators, awards and other support networks—the EZTrain team has achieved several tremendous milestones and built a lot of momentum for where they are heading next!”

EZTrain’s product and impact have led to meetings with some of the most senior-ranking officials in the U.S. military. The team has a pipeline of around 80,000 prospective customers and looks forward to joining the modern era of DoD readiness management.

“Hopefully as we expand our programming relationship with Duke we will see more stories like EZTrain,” Weintraub said. “Our mission is to build a network of innovators to develop solutions to national security problems, and academia and startups are key to that mission.”

NSIN has a “Transition Cell” that provides consultative services for startups that would like to learn about defense contracting, and a Regional Engagement Principal based out of North Carolina who is boots on the ground at military bases and universities building out the network.

“If there are startups interested in the national security space, all they have to do is reach out,” Weintraub said.