The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) used governmentwide OneGov deals to give every employee access to six artificial intelligence (AI) platforms, and more than 70% of its workforce actively uses at least one, according to OPM CIO Adam Starr.
Speaking Tuesday at the GovExec Government & AI Summit in Washington, D.C., Starr said OPM has leaned heavily on the General Services Administration’s (GSA) OneGov agreements to rapidly expand employee access to AI.
“The OneGov deals were key to our ability to innovate at OPM with AI,” Starr said. “We basically bought all of the AI offerings at $1, and so we gave every employee six AI tools, and we encourage them to use it.”
Those tools include Google’s Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, xAI’s Grok, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Perplexity AI, Starr said.
The strategy is intentionally multi-model. Starr said he wants employees to have access to several platforms because AI models are evolving quickly and vendors are regularly “leapfrogging each other.”
“I want to continue to offer everyone at OPM multiple tools so that as the frontier changes, people can move to the best tool, and then vendors can compete for our business every day by offering the best tool at the best price,” he said.
OPM is already seeing broad adoption. Starr said telemetry data shows more than 70% of employees actively use at least one approved AI tool.
The OneGov agreements have been particularly valuable for OPM, a smaller agency without the purchasing power of larger departments, Starr said.
GSA last week announced the next phase of its OneGov agreement with OpenAI, which takes effect Oct. 1 and eliminates platform-access fees while providing a 50% discount on token-based ChatGPT usage. The 27-month agreement replaces the initial $1-per-agency offer that expires Sept. 30.
Starr said the new pricing model will help OPM continue giving employees access to advanced AI tools.
“I’m really encouraging everyone to talk to the GSA OneGov team. It’s just so much easier for me to buy as a small agency from OneGov,” he said. “I feel like I’m getting the right deal.”
Starr offered more details on the agency’s AI efforts in a recent interview for MeriTalk’s Federal CXO Spotlight Series.