Artificial Intelligence for Past Performance – Modernizing Federal Acquisition

Innovation of the Year

In just four months, seven artificial intelligence vendors demonstrated working prototypes for helping agencies better use contractor past performance data — a big win for the two people heading up the acquisition. “Using the agile approach, we engaged with acquisition workforce professionals to discover what was most important to them as users,” Scott Simpson, head of the AI for Past Performance team, said of his work with Phorsha Peel, his partnering contracting officer. “We then worked with our nine vendors to design prototypes that met those user needs, continuously engaging with those users to ensure the prototypes were on the right track.” 2021 will see the continued development of those prototypes into fully developed solutions in Phase 2. “The collaboration between the federal acquisition community and the federal information technology community, and the focus on our users, really makes this an exciting initiative to be involved with, and we are working hard to get secure and functional products that our users want to use as soon as possible,” Simpson said.