How Generative AI Can Help Federal Agencies Write Procurement Contracts

ERIK SWENSSON

Feb 28, 2024

The federal procurement process can be tedious and time-consuming, as each acquisition must comply with the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) a complex regulation over two thousand pages long. From soliciting bids to negotiating and awarding contracts, it often takes agencies months or even years to acquire goods and services. Moreover, it takes years or even decades to master the intricacies of the FAR and contract development where tribal subject matter knowledge can be instantly lost with staff retirements and departures. The White House states that there are over 400,000,000 contracts and orders a year placed by the federal government. So the number of hours and time spent in this process is staggering.

However, new advances in generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) present an opportunity to significantly shorten procurement cycles. Generative AI applications like Morfius’s Procurement AI can now write coherent long-form text and be trained and tuned on FAR and specific agency requirements, in a safe privately hosted environment. These applications can even search meeting transcripts for requirements, scope, and details to help federal buyers generate initial drafts of government contracts and requests for proposals (RFPs). Instead of starting from scratch, federal employees and contractors can now use safe, secure, and explainable AI assistants to put together an initial document that covers all the necessary terms, clauses, and standards based on procurement requirements. This will give them a strong foundation to build upon rather than having to write contracts fully manually.

Morfius has government agencies finding they can save not only half the time it takes to produce a complaint document but also shave weeks off of the procurement cycle, and reduce errors in the process. In this case, it’s not replacing the need for government employees, but rather it allows them to reduce time spent on tedious tasks, freeing them to focus on their agency’s mission.