Innovating AI Procurement

Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly deployed in the public sector. Existing public procurement processes and standards are in urgent need of innovation to address potential risks and harms to citizens. Read our primer based on our research and on input from leading experts in the public sector, data science, civil society, policy, social science, and the law to learn about pathways forward. The COVID-19 pandemic has underlined how biases can manifest in many different aspects of public use technology. For example, federal COVID-19 funding allocation algorithms have favored high-income communities over low-income communities due to historical biases prevalent in the training data. AI solutions that can be implemented fast are typically provided by private companies. As more and more aspects of public service are infused with AI systems and other technologies provided by private companies, we see a growing network of privately owned infrastructure. As government entities outsource critical technological infrastructure (such as data storage and cloud-based systems for data sharing and analysis) to private companies under the guise of modernizing public services, we see a trend towards losing control over critical infrastructure and decreasing accountability to the public that relies on it.