Uncle Sam Asks Industry If It Has AI That'll Make Procurement Suck Less

US government buyers have been busy getting AI into the hands of federal agencies, and now they're taking a moment to ask the industry how some of that AI magic could work for them. 

The General Services Administration (GSA) published a Request for Information (RFI) on Monday, calling on suppliers, industry associations, developers, data scientists, and other experts to help it figure out where AI fits into a planned new end-to-end procurement ecosystem. 

"The RFI is an initial outreach to industry partners looking to provide perspective on GSA's vision and path to updating procurement practices," the GSA said in a statement. It wants a new system "that effectively incorporates AI" too, particularly in two parts of a system design draft included in the Procurement Ecosystem Initiative's RFI document [PDF].

According to that draft, the single-stream procurement platform would feed unstructured and structured data into an acquisition lifecycle management system that has "AI interwoven for searching, writing, planning, [and] assessing." The lifecycle management system feeds into a marketplace landing page and search engine for GSA employees that includes an AI chatbot "with full user context and data access." All of that also feeds into analytics software that enables real-time analysis of government spending. 

In essence, per the RFI doc, the GSA wants to create "a single, integrated, collaborative and highly efficient procurement ecosystem, profoundly enhanced by AI, that will drive significant economy, transparency, and collaboration across the acquisition lifecycle." 

By the GSA's account, that new ecosystem is sorely needed. 

The bulk of the RFI's seven pages focuses on problems in the current incarnation of the acquisition workforce (AWF) systems, which, based on the list of grievances, the GSA seems to think is a bunch of siloed, antiquated garbage.

According to the RFI, there are no standardized processes, templates, or functionality in current systems "to collect data for pre-award, award, and post-award actions, leading to variability in how customers and suppliers submit information for review and action." That's not a great starting point, and it only appears to get worse from there.

"The AWF lacks a unified workload tracking system, forcing managers to manually monitor progress across disparate systems," the document goes on to note. A lack of functionality for "complex acquisitions" means that many high-level procurement processes have to occur offline before being manually integrated into digital systems that, in many cases, have to be populated manually, leading to copy-and-paste errors.

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Once contracts are in the system, the mess continues, with correspondence between contractors and government employees primarily done through emails that someone has to manually add to purchasing software. The GSA "lacks a centralized source for contracting metrics." It also has no ability to share and retain best practices among acquisition teams, leading to them using third-party platforms like GitHub to release information outside of government channels. 

All that doesn't even touch on how the current GSA contracting systems impact suppliers and customers either.

The GSA said that it wants responses – which it's limiting to ten pages written in a very specific format – by August 29, after which point it will figure out what to do next.

"Insights gathered from this RFI will be crucial in shaping our future acquisition strategies," the GSA said. "We anticipate using this feedback to inform potential follow-on engagements." 

The GSA didn't respond to questions for this story. ®