Government agencies can face immense pressure to scale services while upholding stringent regulations. While AI offers unprecedented opportunities for efficiency and service improvement, there are numerous challenges vendors face including data privacy, security, and accountability.
By working together, partners can discover new insights about the challenges and opportunities of public sector AI partnerships. Moveworks’ collaboration with Leidos can serve as a clear success story for navigating a public sector AI partnership.
Leidos is a Fortune 500® innovation company rapidly addressing the world’s most vexing challenges in national security and health. With 48,000 employees worldwide, this leading federal solution provider needed to support highly complex information technology (IT) operations at enterprise scale while meeting stringent security and compliance demands.
At Leidos’ 7th Annual Supplier Symposium, panelists discussed the critical role of technology partnerships in moving through this complex landscape. Some key themes emerged, including:
- How to foster deep technology partnerships for innovation
- How standards and trust fuel public sector AI collaboration
- Understanding evolving AI capabilities and ethical considerations
- Establishing strategies for AI integration and future partnerships
Let’s explore the key themes from this recent symposium and examine how agencies and tech partners can build trust, share knowledge, and drive responsible AI adoption.
How to foster deep partnerships for innovation
The Supplier Symposium showcased the profound and committed relationships between Leidos and its technology partners. These collaborations often go beyond traditional supplier relationships to instead aim at co-developing innovative solutions.
The Moveworks and Leidos collaboration exemplifies this collaboration, shown by Leidos' capacity to integrate and utilize partner technologies internally every day. In October 2023, Leidos introduced Iris, an AI copilot powered by Moveworks inside of Microsoft 365 Government Community Cloud High (GCCH) Teams. Iris leverages generative AI, advanced natural language processing, and deep system integrations to proactively resolve IT issues before they escalate. This AI implementation not only improved IT support but also drove greater adoption of other IT tools, enhancing the overall employee experience and driving enterprise-wide digital transformation.
This transformation resulted in a decrease to mean time to resolution from 47 hours to 15 minutes, significantly boosting employee satisfaction and productivity. By seeing what Moveworks is capable of in their own environment, Leidos will better be able to share this experience with its own customers.
This approach underscores a crucial principle for AI providers: to build trust in both the technology and partnership, it's essential to demonstrate, rather than merely describe, their technological value. Showcasing real-world applications and impact is key to engaging partners effectively.
Left to right: Eric Moore (SVP of Digital Modernization Technology, Leidos), Tom Bell (CEO, Leidos), Bhavin Shah (CEO, Moveworks), and Peter Barrett (Director, Moveworks)
How standards and trust fuel public sector AI collaboration
When public and private sectors collaborate and adhere to established standards, the result is greater potential growth, increased mutual trust, and improvements in public services. Moveworks has expertise in delivering a generative AI platform to over a million end users, but in recent years we’ve started to invest more deeply in the public sector. This investment, together with Moveworks' enterprise-grade architecture, helped to provide the security and scalability Leidos required.
Moveworks operates with common data standards and open architecture principles. An open architecture approach means that we use standard ways to connect different software and hardware, making it easier to add, upgrade, and swap components. These standards are pivotal for avoiding long-term lock-ins with specific technologies, which is a common concern for government partners. Moveworks' offering supports Leidos’ ability to navigate complex security requirements while continuously evolving service delivery through customizable AI workflows.
As a leading federal information technology solutions partner, Leidos has resources and expertise to bring innovative and emerging technology forward for the benefit of its customers. They were also able to support efforts for Moveworks to assist federal workforces, representing significant progress in shared expertise and resources. In essence, this highlights the benefits of collaboration between the public and private sectors, emphasizing the importance of trust, security, and open standards to enable successful results.
Strategies for ethical AI integration and future partnerships
Another notable theme was how to integrate AI into operational workflows and create strategies to harness these extraordinary benefits while ensuring easy assimilation. Panelists discussed the importance of meeting users in their existing operational environments and interfaces to foster adoption and minimize resistance. They also discussed how service delivery can benefit from more agentic AI solutions.
Agentic AI solutions can act autonomously yet responsibly within systems, pushing the boundaries of what AI can achieve. Because of this, it’s important that partners work to ensure AI acts as an enhancer rather than a replacement for human capabilities.
For these reasons, the strongest AI and public sector partnerships are built upon shared values and visions for the future of ethical and effective AI deployment across varied mission-critical environments.
Left to right: Nick Wakeman (Washington Technology), Bhavin Shah (Moveworks), Tom Soderstrom (AWS), Quinn Slack (Sourcegraph), and Ron Keesing (Leidos)
Building AI and public sector partnerships on trust and innovation
Leidos Supplier Innovation & Technology Symposium was an energizing reminder for AI and public sector partners to explore, reflect on, and strategize to build solid ecosystems. AI companies may discover new revenue opportunities by diversifying into the public sector, and can support these collaborations by adhering to open architecture principles and using enterprise-grade security practices.
Similarly, organizations in or supporting the public sector benefit from these partnerships that can accelerate innovation, improve service delivery, mitigate potential risks, and share these benefits back to enterprise customers. As government and tech organizations alike strive towards greater innovation and ethical deployment, the transformative potential of AI technologies for mission-critical government applications may be stronger than ever.
Read our Leidos case study: Discover how to bring AI-powered productivity to the public sector.
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