U.S. Army Acquisition
Using AI-MI to find emerging/diverse small businesses in the IT Services market
Overview
U.S. Army worked with PSF to identify innovative and diverse small businesses in the IT services market. We put our AI and comprehensive datasets to the test!
The Challenge: Finding innovative and diverse small businesses in new and emerging IT services while improving alignment with the commercial market!
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 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 how to get to them!
Approach
To address this challenge, the team decided to use Public Spend Forum’s AI-MI™ (Artificial Intelligence for Market Intelligence) technology and data to the test.
Our goal was to understand the market landscape and uncover potential emerging and diverse small businesses qualified to address the Army’s complex and evolving needs.
The goals of using AI-MI™ were to:
- Understand the scope of IT services purchased by the Army, including areas such as AI, cloud computing, devops and more
- Use PSF’s AI technology to understand the structure of the market and how small and large businesses defined their capabilities
- 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 approach included:
- Utilizing PSF’s OntologyMatch™ tool to identify over 2500 terms used by buyers and suppliers.
- Dynamically developing IT market segments using PSF’s MarketMap™ tool. For example, the dynamic segments revealed over 14 unique and overlapping IT segments versus generic PSC codes that had no distinct differences.
- Mapped over 10,000 suppliers, including almost 2,000 Army incumbent suppliers to the various market segments, to identify where largest gaps and opportunities existed to expand the supplier base
Results
- 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 8k new suppliers, ones that were already working with other agencies, as well as non-traditional suppliers, qualified to work with defense agencies.
- Identified examples of solicitations where competition could have been improved by over 50% by adjusting requirements.
