“Determining whether a function is inherently government is a critical step when an agency is procuring services, and it’s harder than one might think. So the Department of Health and Human Services has built a recurrent neural network to help acquisition staff make the call.”
“The effort is still in proof-of-concept stage, HHS CIO Jose Arrieta told FCW, but the artificial intelligence-powered system already is making the correct determination 86% of the time. The goal is not to automate the entire process, he said, but rather to allow HHS’ human experts to focus on the toughest and most-borderline cases.”
“Those same experts were used to help train the neural network, which used some 9,000 HHS statements of work from past procurements and the Government Accountability Office’s guidelines on inherently governmental functions as the starting point…”
“The total cost to date has been less than $300,000, he said, and the project identified roughly $100 million in potential savings just on the initial batch of statements of work – 11% to 12% of the total portfolio value. But the goals are bigger than just cost savings, Arrieta argued…” Read the full article here.
Source: Can AI decide if work is ‘inherently governmental?’ – By Troy K. Schneider, September 16, 2019. FCW.
