The Department of Veterans Affairs is conducting its third and final RFI supporting its enterprise AI acquisition strategy, this time focused on the contractor services needed to integrate, operate, support and extend AI capabilities across VA. The Office of Information and Technology’s Chief Artificial Intelligence Office anticipates releasing the solicitation in October 2026. VA states there is no incumbent for the services requirement.
VA is separating the acquisition into distinct pieces. The Department plans to acquire its enterprise AI product and native vendor services separately. This requirement covers the third-party professional services needed to make those products work within VA, including integration, operations, user support, adoption and development of additional capabilities. The draft requirement includes a 12-month base and two 12-month options.
The core work includes enterprise integration and sustainment, identity and access, deployment, Tier 1 through Tier 3 support, security and privacy, AI governance, authorization support, incident management and coordination with AI product and cloud providers. The contractor would also support training and adoption, data connections, financial monitoring and migration between products if VA decides to make a change.
VA also contemplates using the contractor to develop AI assistants, agents, connectors and workflow integrations. An example task provides for development using VA-authorized commercial AI products or custom applications when appropriate. VA identifies Anthropic, Google and OpenAI as examples of commercial product suites and calls for open standards and portability between models and platforms.
The planning assumptions indicate the potential operating scale. VA describes rollout waves reaching 540,000 provisioned users, with projected monthly active usage reaching more than 111,000 chat users and 83,000 agentic users.
VA is now seeking industry input on the requirements, firm-fixed-price structure, staffing and subcontracting, pricing and a planned technical challenge as part of the future evaluation.
Who should care: Federal AI and IT integrators, VA technology contractors, digital services firms, cloud and data companies, and contractors with enterprise-scale AI integration, operations, governance, development and user support capabilities.
Read more here. Notice ID 36C10B26Q0834
