Advancing AI Procurement and Adoption in the Public Sector

Considerations, Use Cases and Practical Approaches

Advancing AI Procurement and Adoption

Like no technology before it, artificial intelligence (AI) offers enormous potential to help solve global challenges, improve economic productivity, and enhance people’s lives. Governments around the world are working at pace to understand the underlying technologies and landscape of opportunities that they are presented.  As governments now look to deploying AI, there is pressing need to understand how AI can be procured in the public sector context. 

Responsible AI procurement in the public sector will depend on government stakeholders and technology providers working together to best understand how to adopt and deploy AI in a compliant and ethical manner.

Governments wanting to take advantage of the benefits of AI in a safe and responsible manner require a route to procurement that will necessarily include:

• Understanding how a particular AI solution can solve for their specific requirements;
• Preparing for the skills and competencies that will be required to maximize the opportunities afforded by AI;
• Working with trusted providers of AI solutions who adhere to globally-accepted responsible AI principles; and
• Adopting policies and procurement practices that encourage innovation whilst protecting the rights of private citizens.

In Advancing AI Procurement and Adoption in the Public Sector, we explore the political, socio-economic, and legal issues associated with the procurement of AI technologies by the public sector. We share the work Microsoft is doing to promote the responsible use of AI as well as the work we are doing with our customer community to drive trust in AI. 

We understand that much can be learned from the practical application of AI technologies, and in the spirit of collaboration, we share a number of use cases relevant to the public sector community. Finally, we share perspectives on how modernizing procurement policies and approaches can help enable the public sector to more easily embrace the advantages of cloud, AI, and digital transformation technologies.

AI Procurement Toolkit for Public Sector organizations in the European Union

The toolkit is designed to support public sector organizations across Europe embrace Microsoft’s generative AI solutions, by reference to EU procurement requirements.

The toolkit:

• Identifies the relevant rules and routes to sourcing AI products that public sector organizations in the European Union need to follow
• Provides key product information on Copilot for Microsoft 365 and the Azure OpenAI Service;
• Explains how they can be procured using a five-step sourcing guide; and
• Demonstrates how Microsoft’s AI Customer Commitments can support this process.

We are committed to empowering public sector organizations to embrace AI’s potential while ensuring compliance with their legal obligations. We hope public sector organizations will find this toolkit helpful and will engage with us on this transformative AI journey.