Pentagon Building AI Tool to Speed Up Contract Writing

The Department of Defense’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office is testing an artificial intelligence tool that can help officials write contracts.

CDAO’s AcqBot prototyping effort is part of its Tradewind initiative for sourcing, funding and developing AI and machine learning solutions. Bonnie Evangelista, the execution lead official of the Tradewind initiative, said during the recent Advanced Technology Academic Research Center federal IT modernization summit that AcqBot works like ChatGPT, but it cannot make contracting decisions.

Evangelista added that the Defense Department’s contracting process will still have humans reviewing and validating AI-generated text at every point in the process, Federal News Network reported Thursday.

The CDAO official pointed out that the goal of AcqBot is to speed up the entire contracting process. Evangelista noted, however, that the technology is should be trained, and it could take a while before it can make significant contributions.

The CDAO’s AcqBot prototype is one of several efforts across the government to implement automation technologies. Meikle Paschal, a robotic process automation program manager at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said the agency rolled out semi-unattended bots that still work with human-attended bots to solve problems.

According to Paschal, the agency’s work with bots would allow it to determine high-impact use cases for the technology and ensure that people could focus on more complicated tasks.

Generative AI, the underpinning technology behind ChatGPT, is garnering the Pentagon’s interest. In late January, the Defense Information Systems Agency said generative AI could affect how the Pentagon works in the future.