The Department of Veterans Affairs has outlined a tentative schedule for its upcoming artificial-intelligence services competition. According to a recent request for information, the agency intends to issue the final solicitation in October. The award will cover a three-year Enterprise Artificial Intelligence Support Services contract, which is expected to be structured as a firm-fixed-price agreement tied to specific outcomes or deliverables.
The solicitation will exclude core enterprise AI products and native vendor services, which the VA plans to procure independently and ahead of the third-party engagement. Those first-party offerings will be sourced in a separate contract, after which a single external provider will be selected to deliver the remaining integration, operations and support services.
Following the two awards, the selected third-party contractor will collaborate with the first-party supplier to implement the enterprise AI capabilities across six phased deployment waves. The program targets provisioning of 540,000 users, with each wave expanding access and functionality throughout the department’s network of veterans services.
The VA intends to acquire an AI product suite capable of delivering conversational assistance, analyzing documents and data, retrieving enterprise knowledge, supporting research, generating business documents, providing coding help, and executing agentic tasks. These capabilities are meant to augment internal processes and improve service delivery for veterans.
The broader procurement effort supports the department’s goals to broaden AI accessibility, develop an AI-ready workforce, redesign workflows around intelligent tools, invest in data and infrastructure needed for AI adoption, and maintain transparent governance over AI use. Emphasis is placed on commercial solutions while allowing custom development when off-the-shelf products are unsuitable.
The third-party contract will encompass the full development lifecycle, including requirement refinement, architecture design, coding, integration, testing, security and accessibility remediation, deployment, and post-deployment iteration. In its request for information, VA solicits industry input on conducting a technical challenge during evaluation, as well as comments on the firm-fixed-price model, staffing plans, subcontracting options, and pricing structures.