GSA’s latest 10x projects have notable AI bent

Artificial intelligence played an outsized role in the latest round of submissions to the General Services Administration’s 10x technology investment program, the agency said this week in announcing the 16 ideas it has selected to fund.

The 10x program — which considers technology ideas from civil servants across the government and invests in a handful that it deems transformative for the delivery of public services — received almost 200 proposals this go-round, with roughly one-fifth related to AI.

One selected investment that leverages AI came from a GSA presidential innovation fellow, who pitched a reusable large language model chatbot template for federal agency use. Another idea, submitted by a staffer with the GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service, wants to harness LLMs and other search capabilities to provide more “reliable and accurate” government search results.

A Federal Emergency Management Agency worker, meanwhile, wants the agency to explore automation capabilities in concert with existing FEMA prototypes to ease the documentation work its federal site inspectors must do during disaster recovery. 

And civil servants from the Veterans Health Administration and the Census Bureau teamed up on an idea that would probe “the development of standard technical methods to perform risk assessment, and metrics to measure AI application performance using ethical principles with their technical counterparts,” ensuring that ethical concepts are properly translated to technical methods. 

Non-AI proposals that 10x selected for investments include projects to better define digital identity and rights, a service to verify tribal membership with the tribes themselves, a platform to ease the navigation of federal buildings, and the creation of a shared portal for public feedback, among others.

As part of phase one of the 10x investment program, GSA teams will investigate the problems and determine whether a technical solution is feasible. The results of those investigations inform subsequent investment decisions.

The GSA notes that “only a handful” of the 16 projects will be provided funding through the fourth and final phase, “when we scale our solutions to deliver impact for as many users as possible. For 10x, users include the entire American public.”