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September 18, 2020 By cs

Pentagon’s central AI office wants to standardize its acquisition process

The Pentagon’s top artificial intelligence office released a request for information Aug. 28 outlining interest in establishing a new acquisition approach for standardizing the development and procurement process for AI tools.

According to the solicitation, the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center is “considering” starting a competition for a 501(c) nonprofit manager or managers of its prototype “Artificial Intelligence Acquisition Business Model” that looks to use other transaction authorities to more quickly purchase AI products.

The JAIC’s prototype business model could deliver “AI capabilities through meaningful market research/front-end collaboration and optimal teaming arrangements of both traditional and non-traditional companies for AI product procurement,” the RFI said.  If the plan moves forward, the JAIC would also “explore the possibilities of using the model to enable agile AI acquisition processes to the DoD at scale.”

The JAIC is the Defense Department’s main hub for artificial intelligence and is responsible for increasing adoption of AI across the department. It works with the services and combatant commands to develop AI tools that have practical use.

To meet the military’s needs, the JAIC uses the traditional government contracting process, known as Federal Acquisition Regulation-based contracts, and works with the General Services Administration, the Defense Information Systems Agency and the Defense Innovation Unit.  The traditional acquisition strategy currently being used is unlikely sufficient enough to help the JAIC carry out its mission, the RFI stated.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.c4isrnet.com/artificial-intelligence/2020/09/01/pentagons-central-ai-office-wants-to-standardize-its-acquisition-process/

Filed Under: Government Contracting News Tagged With: agile, AI, artificial intelligence, coronavirus, COVID, DISA, DIU, DIUx, DoD, FAR, GSA, JAIC, Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, OTA, other transaction authority, pandemic, partnering, Pentagon, prototyping, RFI

September 14, 2020 By cs

DoD’s AI center setting itself up to be a more agile buyer, use of OTAs

The Pentagon’s entity for injecting artificial intelligence into the military is considering adopting a new acquisition model that has been championed by the Defense Department for its speed over the past few years, but also concerns government watchdogs for its lack of accountability.

The Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) may use a consortium of companies and academic institutions to procure technologies and services needed to make AI a ubiquitous force within the military. The model pays a consortium manager to oversee a group of companies that pay a small fee to be part of the club.

The advantage of the consortium is it allows JAIC to exercise other transaction authority (OTA), a contracting method that has gained considerable steam since Congress expanded its use for the military.  OTAs let DoD skip federal acquisition regulations to research, tests, prototype and even produce weapons at a faster speed.  OTAs also put an emphasis on partnering with companies that DoD does not usually do business with.

“Up to now, JAIC has primarily worked through traditional defense contractors and traditional Federal Acquisition Regulation-based contracts,” Chris Cornillie, federal market analyst at Bloomberg Government, told Federal News Network. “Given some of the challenges that it’s facing with COVID, and the need to start to scale its production to the Pentagon’s requirements, it’s considering a change in its business model.”

Keep reading this article at: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/defense-main/2020/09/dods-ai-center-setting-itself-up-to-be-a-more-agile-buyer-use-of-otas/

Filed Under: Government Contracting News Tagged With: agile, AI, artificial intelligence, coronavirus, COVID, DoD, JAIC, Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, OTA, other transaction authority, pandemic, partnering, Pentagon, prototyping

December 27, 2018 By AMK

Three competing options for acquiring innovation

The DoD’s technological edge is eroding.

Since 2015, the department has pursued a strategy to regain the lead. During the Obama administration, it was called the Third Offset.  The Trump administration has abandoned that nomenclature, but it is pursuing the same objective.

The DoD seeks dominance in robotics, artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, and three-dimensional printing, among other fields. It recognizes, however, that such innovation will not come from the usual sources — government labs or the defense industrial base.

Nondefense firms have a decisive lead: The center of gravity in cutting edge, military applicable research is shifting abruptly away from the defense establishment to relatively new commercial firms.  The DoD must engage with these nondefense firms to build the next generation of weapon systems. But how should it do so?

Two decades ago, defense economists David Parker and Keith Hartley, mapped the options for procurement along a continuum. On the far left, managerial diktat determines sourcing, and prices have little role in the process. On the far right is a fully competitive market, where the “relationship between buyer and supplier is transitory, non-committal beyond the current purchase, and arm’s length”; between these extremes are, from left to right, subsidiary purchases, joint ventures, partnerships, networks, preferred suppliers, and adversarial competition.

Keiran Walsh, Yale professor of economics, distilled these options down to three:

[T]here are three basic ways of getting people to do what one wants done. One can force them to
behave as one wishes them to. One can give them a set of incentives that aligns their interests with
one’s own. Finally, one can try to shape the values that they hold so that they will naturally want to
do what you wish them to do.

Walsh’s three alternatives, Parker and Hartley explain, correspond to coercion, competition, and long-term partnering.  Of course, the same option needn’t be chosen for every procurement, and perhaps different alternatives may work better in some cases than in others. But the DoD must choose from these options as it determines how to buy innovation from nondefense commercial suppliers and perhaps should identify a default that works best in most cases.

Keep reading this paper at: https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Portals/10/ASPJ/journals/Volume-32_Issue-4/V-Schoeni.pdf

Filed Under: Government Contracting News Tagged With: 3-D printing, acquisition strategy, artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, coercion, competition, DoD, incentive, industrial base, innovation, partnering, partnerships, robotics, technology

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