The Home Office is seeking to appoint a supplier to a multimillion-pound contract to help support the adoption of artificial intelligence across the organisation.
The department has issued a commercial notice alerting the market to its intent to award a deal for an “AI infrastructure delivery partner”. The engagement is expected to commence in late July and last for an initial term of one year – during which the Home Office will spend up to £3m. The deal can then be extended for two further years.
For this price, the department will receive support for its ambitions to “create a new central DDaT (digital, data and technology) capability to support AI adoption at scale” throughout the Home Office’s operations, according to market-engagement documents.
This includes a single, as-a-service-style offering enabling employees to easily tap into sophisticated AI tools to help address issues. This platform will be designed to support officials throughout the process of deploying AI, from initial explorations through to frontline implementation and ongoing support.
It is intended to address a range of challenges, from choosing the right tool for the objective, to ensuring potential security risks are addressed.
“We are proposing to develop a central ‘AI as a Service’ which will enable users across the department to access tailored AI tools without the need to build or maintain the technology themselves,” the engagement specification says.
“Through this, we can significantly reduce the cost and speed of AI adoption with a build once and use many times approach. Although not limited to, the service will have a particular focus on the use of generative AI to solve common widespread problems. This multi-cloud service will be end to end, from problem statement to live, including model selection, assurance, evaluation and ongoing monitoring.”
The document adds that, in order to provide this service, the Home Office requires the assistance of a specialist tech firm.
“Additional capacity and expertise via a delivery partner is essential to progress this work at the pace required to meet departmental demand,” the specification says. “The delivery partner will be working under civil service leadership, alongside the wider [Home Office] Automation and Innovation Team.”
The contract will be awarded via the Crown Commercial Service’s £200m artificial intelligence dynamic purchasing system (DPS) framework.
In the next two weeks, the Home Office will conduct market engagement exercises before, around 9 June, drawing up a shortlist of suppliers via the framework’s “DPS marketplace sourcing tool”, according to procurement documents.
Around a week after this selection exercise, the chosen firms will be invited to submit a tender by 4 July. After these have been assessed and a preferred supplier identified, an agreement is scheduled to come into effect on 28 July, according to the Home Office’s timelines.
A little over a year ago, the department signed a six-month £700,000 contract with digital consultancy Methods to explore possible uses of Microsoft’s Copilot generative artificial intelligence tool, as well as other potential deployments of automation technologies.
The deal covered the provision of support for a programme to “establish test cases for the deployment of Copilot” to a cohort of users across the Home Office.