With artificial intelligence (AI) use accelerating across government, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) is urging federal agencies to share their experiences with the technology to inform future AI procurements.
Agencies are not regularly collecting and sharing lessons learned from acquiring AI, even as their use of AI more than doubled from 2023 to 2024 and is continuing to grow, GAO revealed in an April 13 report.
As a result, officials at the agencies selected for review – the General Services Administration (GSA) and the departments of Defense (DOD), Homeland Security (DHS), and Veterans Affairs (VA) – are “missing opportunities to identify and apply best practices … or to avoid mistakes as agencies increasingly acquire AI,” GAO said.
GAO recommended that each of the four agencies update policies and require officials to systematically collect lessons learned from AI acquisitions – including best practices involving contract clauses – and submit them to a GSA-managed repository to enable sharing and application by other agencies. Federal guidelines say agencies should share knowledge about AI acquisitions through the web-based repository.
Each agency concurred with GAO’s recommendations.
GAO’s report revealed that agencies are using AI for a variety of tasks, including for facial recognition at airports, to analyze veterans’ benefit claims and structural damage caused by natural disasters, and to provide chatbot support.
At the DOD, the Army uses computer vision to enhance targeting for the XM-30 class of combat vehicles, while DOD’s National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency uses computer vision and machine learning to analyze geospatial imagery to identify potential targets for people to assess.
Federal agencies often work with private sector companies to acquire and support AI, the report said. GSA, for example, used partnerships with leading AI companies – OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic – to establish chatbot capabilities to increase the efficiency of administrative functions.
Agency officials told GAO investigators that AI solutions “can offer previously unavailable capabilities or increase efficiency and speed in delivering services.” GAO said agencies “are finding many opportunities to use [AI] to improve how they execute their missions.”
But GAO found the selected agencies “were not yet systematically collecting lessons learned from AI acquisitions – a necessary first step to share knowledge about AI acquisitions in accordance with [Office of Management and Budget] guidance.”
Officials at GSA, DOD, DHS, and VA told GAO they were not prepared to share information because their agency policies did not require them to collect lessons learned – but that having lessons learned from other federal AI buyers “would help them achieve better AI acquisition outcomes.”
GAO agreed, concluding that “without systematic, robust knowledge sharing, federal buyers are more likely to make avoidable mistakes across the acquisition life cycle when they buy AI in the future.”