Illumination Works (ILW) is proud to announce the award of a Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Direct to Phase II (D2P2) contract working with the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) Digital Capabilities Directorate to advance our Raven™ solution.
Raven is an enabling capability that infuses generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP), and computer vision techniques into the acquisition and contracting processes for improved efficiencies. For this effort, ILW will advance existing capabilities to automate the generation of portions of the pricing negotiation memorandum to assist contracting personnel with should-cost analysis and vendor negotiations.
Modernizing Acquisition Processes to Achieve the Speed of Need
The Air Force faces the challenge of timely and consistent evaluation of vendor information during acquisition and contracting processes. At present, the process is time and effort intensive, with minimal automation or technology to assist contracting personnel. These processes are rooted in manual methods and fail to deliver at the speed of need, resulting in misalignment, errors, and inconsistencies. To keep up with the rapidly changing technological landscape, streamlined, AI-assisted acquisition processes are essential to reduce the burden on personnel and shift the focus from manual processes to the high priority tasks of analysis and negotiation.
Intelligent Data Extraction, Analysis & Content Generation
ILW will advance the Raven suite of tools to automatically extract information from vendor documents relevant to price negotiations, generate summary information, and produce a price memorandum for contracting personnel to review, edit, and disseminate. By infusing proven, intelligent data extraction, analyses, and GenAI techniques into the acquisition review and price negotiation process, the Air Force will realize efficiency improvements including reduced person-hours spent on price negotiation memorandum completion, decreased error rates, and eased cognitive burden on contracting personnel performing these tasks manually.
Automating Should-Cost Analyses
ILW will enhance our existing capabilities from technical readiness levels (TRL) 4/5+ to a TRL 6 production-ready prototype to assist the Air Force in their price negotiation process and demonstrate comparative should-cost analyses that break down why a product or service costs what it does.
Raven will be a trustworthy AI partner to contracting personnel and acquisition specialists. This solution from ILW will enable Department of Defense (DoD) personnel to focus on analysis, negotiations, and building relationships, having offloaded the drudgery of manually generating price negotiation memos.”
As an enabling technology, Raven will assist contracting personnel with statistical and comparative analyses across similar services, enabling a birds-eye view transversing different contracts and negotiations. The tool will work in tandem with contracting personnel to accelerate the process of generating price negotiation memorandums using AI techniques and enable comparisons for understanding pricing trends and anomalies faster and more accurately than manual processes.
Key Benefits of Raven
A key benefit of Raven is improving the productivity of personnel, saving thousands of hours each year, and easing the cognitive stress of manual price negotiation and documentation. Additional benefits include:
- Open-Source Tools: Use of open-source tools coupled with custom code, making the solution computing-environment agnostic, and requiring no ongoing subscription or fees
- Human-in-the-Loop: Improve timeliness, accuracy, and traceability of information via interactive, intuitive visualizations and human-in-the-loop functions in modern user interface
- ML Automation: Automate the extraction of text from documents leveraging ML including NLP and computer vision
- GenAI Auto-Population: Leverage GenAI to auto-populate and summarize content for price negotiation to improve efficiencies in time and cost
- Data Provenance: Implement data stores and data provenance techniques to increase reliability and traceability
- Cloud-Based Analytics: Utilize cloud-native, platform agnostic, and service-oriented architecture for rapid deployment into cloud-based analytics environments
This project is sponsored by AFWERX, a component of the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL).
Contact Information
- Jan Turkelson | Senior Vice President | Illumination Works | [email protected] | LinkedIn
- Janette Steets | Director of Data Science | Illumination Works | [email protected] | LinkedIn
- Srini Anand | Principal Data Scientist | Illumination Works | [email protected] | LinkedIn
About Illumination Works
Illumination Works is a trusted technology partner in user-centric digital transformation, delivering impactful business results to clients through a wide range of services including big data information frameworks, data science, data visualization, and application/cloud development, all while focusing the approach on the end-user perspective.
Established in 2006, ILW has primary offices in Dayton and Cincinnati, Ohio, as well as physical operations in Utah and the National Capital Region. In 2020, Illumination Works adopted a hybrid work model and currently has employees in 20+ states and is actively recruiting.
