Veterans Affairs previews timeline for enterprise AI services competition
Hiroshi Watanabe / DigitalVision via Getty Images
By
Ross Wilkers
A final solicitation for the potential three-year contract is just around the corner and will task the winner with rolling out artificial intelligence capabilities to 540,000 users.
The Veterans Affairs Department has given industry a rough timeline for when it plans to compete an artificial intelligence services contract focused on third-party services, including integration and operations.
VA is looking to release a final solicitation in October for the potential three-year Enterprise Artificial Intelligence Support Services contract that will likely be firm-fixed-price for outcomes or deliverables tied to the requirement, the department said in a Tuesday request for information.
Core enterprise AI product and native vendor services are not in the scope of this planned contract. VA plans to acquire those and other first-party offerings separately, and immediately before it procures the third-party services from a single company.
Following both awards, the third-party services provider will then work with the first-party supplier to roll out the enterprise AI capabilities via a series of six rollout waves with the goal of reaching 540,000 provisioned users.
VA is looking to acquire an AI product suite for functions such as conversational assistance, document and data analysis, enterprise knowledge retrieval, research, business document generation, coding assistance, and agentic task execution.
VA is embarking on these procurements to support its efforts to expand AI access across the department, build an AI-ready workforce, reimagine its workflows with AI-centric capabilities, invest in data and infrastructure for AI adoption, and run transparent AI governance.
The third-party contract’s scope is intended to cover the full development lifecycle involving requirements refinement, architecture, development, integration, testing, security and accessibility remediation, deployment, and post-deployment iteration.
While VA is emphasizing the use of commercial AI products, the department is also open to working with the third-party contractor on custom application development efforts when a commercial tool is not the appropriate or authorized surface.
The new RFI asks industry to weigh in on how VA could conduct a technical challenge as part of the evaluation. VA also wants feedback on the requirements, firm-fixed-price structure, staffing, subcontracting and pricing elements.
Responses are due by 10 a.m. Eastern time on Oct. 7.