User-friendly public procurement guidance on AI: why we think it’s needed, and what we are doing about it

Each year, we ask our global community working on public procurement transformation what the issues they most want our help with. This time, we got a resounding answer: procuring AI. 

This should be of no surprise. Policymakers want to leverage AI to help modernize services, but governments already struggle to make tech-savvy purchases. AI adds a whole new level of complexity (and opportunity) to ensure good results and accountability. Our partners want support across the procurement process for AI, from designing agile outcome-driven procurements and smart RFPs and contracts, to collaborating with cross-departmental stakeholders and their communities, to engaging the market. Our early research suggests that partners also want advice on how to promote transparency, improve internal decision-making processes, manage the performance and delivery of projects, and better understand the algorithms themselves. We explored some of the key questions in last year’s blog series.

We know our community wants more deep and detailed assistance, and we want to tap into the best ideas and lessons from across our network. We are glad to be supported by Amazon Web Services (AWS) to develop vendor-neutral guidance grounded in user needs. This guidance will help practitioners get started and succeed, and include actionable templates and tactics. For example, part of the guidance may include a decision flow chart for procurement managers that outlines key considerations when procuring AI technologies.

To achieve this action-oriented and vendor-neutral guidance, we will gather insights from government procurement professionals, academia, and industry, and capture practical experiences from across the field. As part of this process, we are co-hosting a series of workshops with the George Washington University Law School Government Procurement Law Program and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

OCP and AWS have developed some objectives for our work together to deliver on this opportunity. They are:  

• We will produce truly vendor-neutral content. To achieve this, we will solicit input from various stakeholders, and distill a variety of cross-sector voices, experiences, and opinions.
• We are independent and equal contributors, and neither will have veto power on overall content or outputs. 
• Events and guidance will be hosted by OCP (and other organizations to be decided by our user research) with public acknowledgment of AWS on all products.

We anticipate that our approach will help us develop some of the best guidance on AI for public sector procurement professionals yet, but we will need our community’s input to succeed. If you are interested in learning more or want to share your thoughts, please reach out to me here.