NIH Contract "ACCELERATE" with EXCELOUS, LLC: Emerging Tech to Support Acquisition Work — a federal contract (USAspending)

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is a central U.S. agency for medical and life-science research, and it carries out a large volume of acquisition every day — acquisition meaning the set of activities through which the government buys goods and services from outside vendors, from awarding research funding to purchasing supplies and services. This kind of work involves many routine tasks such as checking rules, preparing documents, and obtaining approvals, which can place a heavy load on the staff who handle it. The project in this contract, "ACCELERATE," is positioned as an effort to support the people who carry out that acquisition work.

The technologies the contract brings together are several emerging technologies of different kinds: blockchain (a way of managing records in a distributed, hard-to-tamper-with form), machine learning (a technique that learns patterns from data to make predictions or classifications), artificial intelligence (AI), and RPA (robotic process automation — software that performs the repetitive desk work a person would otherwise do on a computer). The description bundles these as ways to give acquisition staff useful insights and enable decision making, which points toward improving administrative work through the integration of multiple technologies rather than any single tool.

This award can be read as one example of the federal government's effort to bring emerging technology into its back-office work — the administrative and support functions behind the scenes. USAspending is the system that publishes federal spending, and following contracts one by one makes it possible to see, across agencies, which areas receive what scale of funding. The fact that a research agency like NIH invests not only in research itself but also in modernizing the acquisition infrastructure that supports research is a useful lens for viewing this contract.