As part of its innovation efforts, a US Army team wanted to get deeper visibility into its IT Services spending and prioritize opportunities to engage more non-traditional and underserved companies
Instead of traditional, manual research and analysis methods, it decided to utilize PSF’s AI-MI (AI for Market Intelligence) data and services to:
- Gain visibility into IT services spending which was well beyond $5 billion
- Understand the IT services industry, emerging capabilities and the non-traditional/diverse supplier base
- Identify opportunities to align better with industry and accelerate engagement with emerging/diverse suppliers
Results:
- AI-driven “language of the market” analysis revealed a lack of commercial alignment with the market. With only used 17% of the same terms being used by buyers as by emerging suppliers, the team knew improving overall requirements and terminology alignment would result in attracting more qualified suppliers to Army solicitations.
- Identified over 7,500 new suppliers, ones that were already working with other agencies, as well as non-traditional suppliers, qualified to work with defense agencies.
- Matched over 100 award-winning suppliers using AI-MI that were not incumbents but had won SBIR and other innovation awards by the government
Overview
The Challenge: Understanding IT spending and opportunities to accelerate innovation and small business spending
With the market changing rapidly, the Army’s acquisition teams wanted to find a better way than traditional market research to identify and attract innovative small and diverse businesses in the IT market. They knew thousands of companies in areas such as Cloud Computing, DevOps, and AI/ML were emerging. But they did not know how they were already spending with these firms, where new and emerging capabilities existed and how best to identify them given the fast pace of change.
Approach
To address this challenge, the team put Public Spend Forum’s AI-MI™ (Artificial Intelligence for Market Intelligence) technology and data to work.
Overview – Traditional methods of market and industry analysis can be limiting
Traditional market/industry and spending analysis methods, from pulling data to analyzing research, can take time, be costly and ineffective. They also can be incomplete given the limitations of human analysis to go through terabytes of data to understand spending, supplier capabilities and more.
Additionally, we knew scoping the industry for “IT services” using PSC and NAICS codes would potentially leave out a lot of qualified emerging/diverse companies, leading to an incomplete and inaccurate picture of the opportunities.
Goals – Utilizing AI-MI™ :
- Spending – Understand the scope of IT services purchased by the Army, including areas such as AI, Cloud Computing, DevOps, and more
- Market Structure – Use PSF’s AI technology to understand the structure of the market and how small and large businesses defined their capabilities
- Identify Companies – Identify thousands of small businesses qualified to address Army’s complex requirements
To make rapid progress, our team put our AI-MI™ workflow as well as comprehensive demand/supply datasets to work.
The overall approach included:
- Understanding overall scope of IT Services, ustilizing AI and comprehensive market datasets
- Identifying emerging/diverse suppliers as well as those already working across government
- Identify opportunities for rapid action as well as longer-term actions
Understanding the overall scope of IT Services, using AI-MI™
Scoping an industry as vast as IT services can be challenging, given its many moving parts. PSC and NAICS codes can provide a starting piont but given their static nature, they fail to account for changes happening on a daily basis.
Given these limitations, we utilized our OntologyMatch™ tools to get a full sense of the Language of IT Services Market. Alongside our analysts, the ontology outputs allowed us to understand over 2500 terms used by buyers and suppliers.
One key finding, only 17% of terms used by buyers and suppliers matched. As you can imagine, that can have many negative consequences from lack of ability of buyers/suppliers to find each other to requirements being constructed in a manner that doesn’t align with industry.
The ontological analysis also allowed us to yynamically develop IT market segments using PSF’s MarketMap™ tool. For example, the dynamic segmentation analysis revealed 14 unique and overlapping IT segments versus generic PSC codes that had no distinct differences.
Supplier Identification – Utilizing our supplier identification AI tools, we were then able to identify over 10,000 suppliers, including almost 2,700+ incumbent suppliers to the various market segments.
The 2700 suppliers included many suppliers that had already been awarded SBIR contracts, for example, providing an opportunity to explore companies already vetted by the government.
Additionally, we were able to identify the biggest opportunities to attract emerging and diverse suppliers, by segment.
Results
Uncovered over 7,500 new emerging and diverse IT services suppliers
- Identified a lack of commercial alignment with the market. With only used 17% of the same terms being used by buyers as by emerging suppliers, the team knew improving overall alignment would result in attracting more suppliers to each solicitation.
- Identified over 7,500 new suppliers, ones that were already working with other agencies, as well as non-traditional suppliers, qualified to work with defense agencies.
- Identified over 100 award-winning suppliers that were not incumbents but had won SBIR and other innovation awards by the government
- Out of 10,363 unique suppliers, 5,500+ suppliers have Minority Ownership status.
NOTE: Supplier Total Represents Overlapping Supplier Counts
Sample of Suppliers with Minority Ownership
HOW CAN WE USE AI-MI TO HELP YOU?
If you are a company (or venture capital/PE firm) looking to accelerate growth or validate the market opportunities in the government market, please contact us at support@publicspendforum.net to learn more about Public Spend Forum’s Market Planning and Customer Matching service.
If you are a government agency leader looking to provide more transparency into your demand or collaborate with other agencies buying similar solutions, please contact us at support@publicspendforum.net to learn more about Public Spend Forum’s Market Planning and Customer Matching service.