The General Services Administration (GSA) has teamed up with major tech companies under its new OneGov strategy, and GSA Acting Administrator Stephen Ehikian said on Thursday that more deals are on the way as the agency signals it’s “open for business.”
GSA rolled out the OneGov strategy in April with the aim of modernizing and streamlining Federal IT and other acquisitions through standardized terms and pricing. Since then, the agency has inked governmentwide pricing deals on a range of services with Oracle, Elastic, Google, Adobe, Salesforce, and – just announced this week – Uber.
“Everything we’re doing right now is all around efficiency – make the government more efficient, effective, and better representing the stakeholders, which are American taxpayers,” Ehikian said on Thursday at the Government Efficiency Summit in Washington.
“The outcome of this will be, kind of think about Costco and Walmart. You have one wallet to purchase all your goods,” he explained. “I think the United States government is the number one customer in the world, so we can actually act like that. So, one wallet to purchase, we’re getting phenomenal discounts. You’ve probably seen things like the OneGov strategy. This is all about leveraging this wallet, and we’re seeing phenomenal success.”
The OneGov strategy helps to support an executive order President Donald Trump issued in April that directs Federal agencies to prioritize commercial, cost-effective solutions in Federal contracts.
Ehikian also said there is “a pipeline of deals” in the works with other companies that want to work with the Federal government.
“We’re open for business. I mean, this administration, we want to do deals. We want to work together. We just want to make sure we are seen as the best customer in the world,” he said.
When it comes to IT procurement, Ehikian said GSA’s job is to provide “the best tools to the government workforce to make them as productive and effective as possible.” AI, he said, is starting to play a larger role in that.
“We are Switzerland. We do not want to pick and choose winners. It’s kind of why we built our internal chatbot a year ago,” Ehikian said. “We didn’t want to pick which model is going to win. We just wanted to make it flexible and modular so we can swap out models as they come out.”
“Same approach to all the top AI models. We are going to be engaging with all of them. They all want to work with the government. They are offering phenomenal opportunities and deals. We’ll have more to talk about that in the future,” he teased.
As of today, Ehikian said that, on average, 50 percent of GSA employees are using the agency’s internal generative AI tool – known as GSAi – every single day.
The GSA chief said those employees are using the tool for tasks such as writing descriptions of properties, reviewing contracts, extracting terms from a PDF document, or learning how to code.
Notably, Ehikian said that in the first six months of this year, GSA has saved 300,000 hours in workflows using all of its internal AI tools.
“That is up dramatically from just last year,” he said. “We literally get requests for new use cases every single day.”
“I would say the other piece is enablement,” he added. “People want to use these tools. They don’t really know how to use them.”
To help address that problem, Ehikian said he started holding demos every Friday at 2 p.m. for Federal employees to showcase the work they’re doing to drive efficiencies.
“You’re not being evaluated. It’s a completely safe space. It started off as GSA only, and again, anybody can just register. It was engineers initially, then became business people, then designers, and then we started getting requests across the government,” he said. “Other agencies want to showcase what they’re doing, kind of a show and tell, and it’s been an awesome opportunity to cross-pollinate business, technologists, agency, and government leaders.”