Background
NATO wanted to rapidly accelerate concept and capability development to get the best solutions in the hands of the warfighter faster. To achieve this, they required a single authoritative source to shape the design, execution, and exploitation of all trials and experimentation (T&E) particularly as the number of events continued to grow but resources remained limited. However, much of the scheduling, planning, and reporting was being done in silos with legacy software. In practice, the scheduling, planning, and reporting of T&E activities were conducted in isolation using disconnected software. This created coordination gaps, reduced visibility, slowed progress and limited the ability to fully exploit outcomes.
Challenge
Deliver a user-friendly, NATO-ready solution for designing, planning, evaluating, and exploiting trials and experimentation. The system must connect strategic, operational, and tactical levels, and enable planners to align T&E activities centrally, over a five-year horizon. It must also facilitate point-of-need observations, data analysis, and exploitation, while providing a framework to ensure lessons learned can be captured and exploited, securely shared, and used to inform defense capability development across the Alliance.
Solution
Exonaut is a centralized digital platform for trials and experimentation activity that supports Project TALOS. It connects planning, design, execution, data collection, and evaluation within a common environment, providing a single version of the truth. Designed for both experts and non-specialists, it enables T&E activities to be easily entered in the system, centrally approved structured and aligned within a coordinated five-year planning cycle. Real-time data capture and advanced analytics transform collected data into actionable insights. Links to the NATO Defense Capability Hierarchy and AI-assisted reporting ensure findings are generated quickly and made available across the Alliance.
Benefits
Exonaut replaces fragmented processes with an integrated, collaborative approach. It gives planners a clear view of all activities, helping to avoid duplication and focus resources where they are most effective. The consistent methodology ensures insights from each trial contribute to a growing, evidence-based knowledge base, rather than remaining isolated. This transforms individual activities into evidence that informs operational decisions, future capability development, and measurable outcomes. The result is improved use of data, faster and more informed decision-making, and increased readiness. Ultimately, this strengthens the Alliance’s ability to innovate, adapt, and transform in a rapidly evolving defense landscape.
“Exonaut is a force multiplier for NATO experimentation. This has the potential to be the most significant accelerant to NATO transformation we’ve seen in years.”
Colonel Nick Waldron, Head of NATO ACTs EWB branch
Transforming Trials & Experimentation: 2024 vs 2025 at REPMUS & Dynamic Messenger
REPMUS & Dynamic Messenger 2024 involved over 1400 participants, 90 unmanned systems, ten warships and 17 nations. Experiment data collection was handled manually using spreadsheets via a centralized repository and emails. The Evaluation, Analysis, and Assessment team (EAA) were responsible for compiling and cleaning the data to extract basic analysis, however, only seven OPREP surveys were captured during the exercise. With such a small amount of data it was difficult to generate meaningfully insight or inform operational decision-making.
Fast forward to 2025. Project TALOS powered by Exonaut was deployed during REPMUS & Dynamic Messenger, which now had over 2,000 participants, 260 systems and 22 nations. Users submitted OPREP surveys within the mobile-based application during the experimentation serials. The platform ensured data integrity, supported real-time updates, and applied strict role-based access controls. Integrated AI tools automatically detected themes and generated concise summaries. These were exported in real-time into NATO’s federated data mesh, enabling wider analysis and faster insight across the Alliance..
Project TALOS delivers an immediate impact
More than 600 OPREP surveys were submitted through the application, with all data instantly available through the system’s intuitive dashboards. This significantly strengthened analytical outputs and provided decision-makers with real-time insights to shape the conduct of the experiment. Within Exonaut this could range from a straightforward validation to a rerun, a targeted adjustment or a fundamental shift in approach to further test a system.
What had been a fragmented manual process in 2024 became a continuous live feedback loop in 2025. The deployment of Exonaut enabled a step change in scale and operational relevance with key insights delivered both during and after the exercise to Command and NATO-level repositories.
