The Department of Veterans Affairs announced a rough schedule for its upcoming artificial-intelligence services procurement. A final solicitation is slated for October, launching a three-year Enterprise Artificial Intelligence Support Services contract. The agreement is expected to be a firm-fixed-price vehicle tied to specific outcomes or deliverables outlined in the requirement, according to a request for information released on Tuesday.
The solicitation will not cover core enterprise AI products or native vendor services. Those components are planned to be acquired separately and will precede the third-party services contract. By separating first-party offerings from the third-party engagement, VA aims to source each category through distinct procurement pathways before the combined rollout begins.
Following the award of both the first-party and third-party contracts, the selected third-party provider will partner with the first-party supplier to implement enterprise AI capabilities. Deployment is organized into six sequential rollout waves, with the ultimate goal of provisioning AI services to approximately 540,000 users across the department. This phased approach is intended to manage scale and integration complexity.
VA’s AI product suite acquisition will target functions such as conversational assistance, document and data analysis, enterprise knowledge retrieval, research support, business document generation, coding assistance, and agentic task execution. The department emphasizes commercial AI offerings but remains open to custom application development when a commercial tool does not meet authorized requirements. This flexibility aims to balance off-the-shelf solutions with tailored capabilities.
The procurement effort supports VA’s broader strategy to broaden AI access, develop an AI-ready workforce, redesign workflows around AI-centric capabilities, invest in data and infrastructure for AI adoption, and maintain transparent AI governance. The new request for information also asks industry participants to comment on a possible technical challenge in the evaluation, as well as on requirements, firm-fixed-price structure, staffing, subcontracting and pricing considerations.