The General Services Administration’s (GSA) Alliant 2 Governmentwide Acquisition Contract (GWAC) has had a lot of success in providing IT solutions to both Federal agencies and industry, and GSA experts said today they expect to see increased AI and automation tech going forward.
GSA’s Alliant 2 GWAC is a multiple-award contract expected to run until June 30, 2023, with a ceiling of $50 billion, according to GSA. Some of the IT solutions it offers include AI, distributed ledger technology, robotic process automation, and other emerging technologies.
Speaking during ACT-IAC’s virtual event, “GSA’s Alliant 2 – Looking Ahead,” the GSA team working on Alliant 2 discussed how the contract is working, and what buying trends and habits they’re seeing on the vehicle.
“GWACs work. The tremendous success Alliant 2 has and is currently having shows that we’re meeting our client’s requirements,” said Paul Bowen, director for the Center for GWAC Programs, Enterprise Acquisition Programs, at GSA. “For industry, we work with our industry partners very well. We’re concerned about solutions and again, you know I’ll reiterate that our allegiance is to taxpayers, and to ensure that the clients get the best solutions for them.”
When it comes to trends, Bowen said he has seen the Federal government implementing more AI and robotic process automation in task orders.
“I expect that artificial intelligence will continue to increase in importance. RPA is certainly a game-changer,” Bowen said. “I anticipate that much work will become automated, automation through RPA or other automation, so that we have that. We envision overall long term that we’ll be seeing more and more of that sort of work in the future. However, we still have the everyday requirements we have for IT services, those haven’t gone away. It’s just I see that there will be an increase in additional areas.”
Omar Saeb, Alliant program manager at GSA’s Office of Information Technology Category, added to Bowen’s point and clarified that the task orders don’t always come in as AI-specific.
“It’s not necessarily where the task order isn’t overall named ‘artificial intelligence solutions.’ No, it’s more it’s part of the overall solution,” Saeb explained. “It’s more so, different types of new technologies being incorporated into IT services that are needed across different government agencies.”
“It could be a small percentage of a solution, it could be a larger percentage of a solution,” Bowen added. “But again, these tend to involve multiple technologies. And of course, security is a portion of everything. So we can never take that out.”
