DARPA Contracts Management Office – Other Transaction Agreement Assistant

The vision of this project is to deliver a system to help the contracts management offices of government agencies improve the Other Transaction Authority (OTA) process that governs Other Transaction (OT) Agreements. In 1989, Congress provided DOD with its first other transaction authority, which applied to advanced research projects performed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) [National Defense Authorization Act, 1989; Soloway et al., 2021]. Since the creation of the Authority, the use of OTs has expanded to many agencies throughout the Government. As of 2023, 11 federal agencies use Other Transactions (OT) to conduct business. These agencies include the Department of Defense (DoD), NASA, the Department of Energy (DOE), and others [Bell, 2023].??  Unfortunately, considering the expanded use of OTs, there is no single OT repository, and best practices are only shared informally between individuals. In addition, there is substantial knowledge turnover due to rotation, replacement, and retirement. It will mine Internet sources for issues and benefits experienced by performers. It will capture and analyze OT disputes, protests, court cases, insights from professional societies, trends, and lessons learned. It will also serve as a tool for proactive dispute management. ?Most important, it will enable contracting officers to use the agentic LLM component of the proposed system to ask questions about the data via a conversational chat interface.   The proposed system will enable individual contracting officers to find and analyze OT information, and to add new information, including results from analyses, lessons learned and best practices, and share with their peers. It will also enable capture of the workflows used by individual contracting officers so that they can be automated, parameterized, shared with their peers, and used to produce periodic reports.  This project is part of the growing trend in which AI, especially recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Generative AI, is revolutionizing business. Quoting McKinsey & Company [2023]:  “Generative AI’s impact on productivity could add trillions of dollars in value to the global economy. Our latest research estimates that generative AI could add the equivalent of $2.6 trillion to $4.4 trillion annually across the 63 use cases we analyzed—by comparison, the United Kingdom’s entire GDP in 2021 was $3.1 trillion. This would increase the impact of all artificial intelligence by 15 to 40 percent. This estimate would roughly double if we include the impact of embedding generative AI into software that is currently used for other tasks beyond those use cases.”   We will divide the project into two phases. During phase one (year one) we will focus on the needs of the DARPA Contracts Management Office (CMO). During phase two (year two), we will expand to other government agencies, and potentially other critical workflows beyond OTs.?