The Pentagon plans to jumpstart a new generation of public-private partnerships by making much of its high-tech research readily available to industry through a new AI-augmented database, with an “alpha” version going online by the end of the year, the official leading the effort told Breaking Defense.

Currently, a federally funded non-profit called TechLink hosts an online database with patents and other data for over 5,400 technologies from DoD labs, with over 500 new ones added every year. Anyone can search the database and follow up with TechLink’s on-staff experts for free. TechLink estimates that it’s helped companies create over 45,000 jobs and $5 billion in revenues since 2000. But the number of patents is so large, and their content is so abstruse, that non-experts often struggle to find what they’re looking for, both DoD and TechLink officials told Breaking Defense.

To fix that, TechLink Associate Director Austin Leach told Breaking Defense, “we are in a project right now, actually, working with some vendors to rethink the search process on our website, pulling in AI tools.”