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Secretary of State Antony Blinken is a major advocate for the U.S. Interested parties have until July 17 to respond to State’s RFI. And as is the case with any federal RFI, the department is cl State admits there are some constraining factors that could limit moving forward with generative AI, including that the technology hasn’t been approved for use by the department, and the department doesn’t have a published AI policy yet. The goal is this would not only reduce costs, manual labor and the chance of errors but also improve decision-making and deliver better contract outcomes, the department believes. The ideal solution would prompt a user to write a problem statement for the acquisition at hand and the generative AI solution would “generate a complete, draft PR package for any type of IT purchase, for a government procurement professional to review for potential edits, prior to submission in the contracting writing system,” the RFI explains. But this can lead to errors or introduce risks, like “creating opportunities to exclude mandatory cybersecurity requirements while incorporating outdated provisions and clauses.” “The goal of embedding AI technology into an existing and recurring process is to reduce inefficiencies from manual laborious tasks, simplifying workflows, and improving the accuracy of repetitive tasks in the market research and acquisition planning phases while also addressing the nuances of IT-acquisitions.”Ĭurrently, contracting officers typically copy and paste information from previous contracts to save time, State says in the document.
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“DOS business operations rely on outdated technology and manually intensive processes that result in unexploited data resources, wasted labor hours, and gross inefficiencies,” the RFI states. State’s bureaus of Information Resource Management - its CIO’s office - Consular Affairs, and International Narcotics and Law Enforcement are leading the effort.
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