The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is planning to release a final solicitation in October for its Enterprise Artificial Intelligence Support Services contract, which will support the department’s broader rollout of AI capabilities.
The potential three-year contract is expected to focus on third-party services, including AI integration and operations, and will likely use a firm-fixed-price structure tied to specific outcomes or deliverables. Core enterprise AI products and other first-party vendor services are not included in the contract and are expected to be acquired separately.
Following the awards, the selected third-party services contractor will work with the first-party AI provider to deploy enterprise AI capabilities across VA through six rollout waves, with the goal of reaching approximately 540,000 provisioned users.
VA is seeking an enterprise AI product suite that can support functions including conversational assistance, document and data analysis, enterprise knowledge retrieval, research, business document generation, coding assistance, and agentic task execution. The third-party services contract is expected to cover the development lifecycle, including requirements refinement, architecture, development, integration, testing, security, accessibility, deployment, and post-deployment support.
VA is currently seeking industry feedback on several elements of the planned acquisition, including the potential use of a technical challenge during the evaluation process, contract requirements, staffing, subcontracting, pricing, and the proposed firm-fixed-price structure.
Responses to the Request for Information (RFI) are due by 10:00 AM ET on October 7.