General Services Administration will use AI to monitor AI

The General Services Administration will use artificial intelligence to monitor the deployment of AI applications as part of an $807 million contract awarded to NCI Information Systems.

GSA awarded the Digital Innovation for GSA Infrastructure Technologies (DIGIT) task order to NCI, in part, because of a proposed Evolve Wall command-center screen displaying the lifecycle of AI deployments.

The wall will provide Chief Information Officer David Shive and his leadership team with valuable, real-time information, also accessible on their desktops, as GSA aggressively integrates emerging technologies to become an end-to-end digital entity.

“It’s a pretty comprehensive and transparent view of the technologies that are being introduced, those that are being implemented and adopted,” Paul Dillahay, president and CEO of NCI, told FedScoop. “And that was certainly something that I think was discriminating for our proposal and something that I believe will become more commonplace over a longer period of time.”

The commercial technology identifies an organization’s new emerging technology use cases, showing their impact and the speed at which they can become proofs of concept and ultimately deployed.

GSA could use the wall to look at an AI module rolled out two months ago and see how much it’s learning and thereby improving its efficiency.

“They’re really looking to disrupt their own infrastructure and environment so that they can offer better business outcomes and a better customer experience by adopting and accelerating the use of things like AI,” said Bridget Medeiros, chief growth officer at NCI.

The DIGIT task order covers other aspects of intelligent automation, such as automating mundane service desk tasks with robotic process automation and machine learning (ML). The goal is to only have humans interacting with customers dealing with software or hardware problems when absolutely necessary. And when they do, sentiment analysis will inform them of the person’s tone and needs.

NCI is further bringing animated personas to test new service desk concepts without interrupting the day-to-day work of users. Large companies already use personas to test new products before they go to market, and NCI has adapted them for GSA.

A persona can be used to test how changing an aspect about how technicians, administrators or contract specialists work will impact them, as well as what the benefits might be, using ML.

NCI partners’ code is all U.S. based, making it easier for the company to get an authority to operate and work with GSA in other areas like improving the agency’s cybersecurity tools in the wake of the massive SolarWinds hack compromising eight agencies. To date, GSA has not acknowledged any compromise, but its Federal Acquisition Service has used the Orion software in question.

The DIGIT task order has a one-year base and a maximum performance period of seven years and was awarded under the Alliant 2 governmentwide acquisition contract. The award was made by the Federal Systems Integration and Management Center on behalf of the Office of Digital Infrastructure Technologies. It’s also the largest award in NCI’s 31-year history.