GSA taps AI to review contract solicitations

NOTE: This article first appeared on FCW.com. 

The General Services Administration is working on an artificial-intelligence-based tool that can automatically tell if an agency's contract solicitation complies with federal regulations.

The GSA's Solicitation Review Tool, or SRT, will ensure federal contracts comply with Section 508 requirements that all website content be accessible to people with disabilities, according to Marina Fox, dot-gov domain services manager at the agency.  

Ensuring  contract compliance has been an issue for the federal government because of the variety of contracting practices across agencies. The language for section 508 compliance, she explained to reporters after a panel on disruptive data technology at ATARC's data analytics summit on Oct. 23, can appear in many different forms in solicitations.

Human review of solicitations for compliance was expensive and time consuming, Fox said. Lawsuits challenging non-compliant websites played a big part in GSA's decision to create the compliance tool, which has been in development for about year and a half, she said. Currently, the agency is transitioning it out of the AWS cloud development sandbox to cloud.gov, and GSA aims to have SRT in production in the fall of 2019 after it gets its authority to operate, she said.

GSA had hoped to have SRT in production in the spring of 2018, according to previous congressional testimony.

The tool uses a predictive data engine to sniff out 508 compliance language on solicitations after they're posted on FedBizOpps. If a discrepancy is found, it requires a compliance amendment be filed to that site. The tool could eventually scan a solicitation for compliance as it is being uploaded to FedBizOpps and alert the contracting officer via email if the document is out of compliance before it is posted, Fox said.

SRT could also be used for a variety of GSA regulatory compliance reviews, such as those for the Federal Risk Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), cybersecurity, Federal Identity Credential and Access Management and environmental projects, she said.

The tool, she said, has already read "thousands" of solicitations for compliance as it was being developed and tested at GSA, having started with a set of 1,000 initial selected solicitations. SRT has a 95 percent accuracy rate, according to Fox, though GSA has learned that solicitations have to be completely machine readable for the tool to review them. It can't read scanned PDF files, for instance.