Tools & Platforms
Want Accountable AI in Government? Start with Procurement
In 2018, the public learned that the New Orleans Police Department had been using predictive policing software from Palantir to decide where to send officers. Civil rights groups quickly raised alarms about the tool’s potential for racial bias. But the deeper issue wasn’t just how the technology worked, but the processes that shaped its adoption by the city. Who approved its use? Why was it hidden from the public?
Like New Orleans, all US cities rely on established public procurement processes to contract with private vendors. These regulations, often written into law, typically apply to every government purchase, whether it’s school buses, office supplies, or artificial intelligence systems. But this case exposed a major loophole in the city’s procurement rules: because Palantir donated the software for free, the deal sidestepped the city’s usual oversight processes. No money changed hands, so the agreement didn’t trigger standard checks such as a requirement for city council debate and approval. The city didn’t treat philanthropic gifts like traditional purchases, and as a result, key city officials and council members had no idea the partnership even existed.
Inspired by this story and several others across the US, our research team, made up of scholars from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, decided to investigate the purchasing processes that shape critical decisions about public sector AI. Through interviews with nineteen city employees based in seven anonymous US cities, we found that procurement practices vary widely across localities, shaping what’s possible when it comes to governing AI in the public sector.
Procurement plays a powerful role in shaping critical decisions about AI. In the absence of federal regulation of AI vendors, procurement remains one of the few levers governments have to push for public values, such as safety, non-discrimination, privacy, and accountability. But efforts to reform governments’ procurement practices to address the novel risks of emerging AI technologies will fall short if they fail to acknowledge how purchasing decisions are actually made on the ground. The success of AI procurement reform interventions will hinge on reconciling responsible AI goals with legacy purchasing norms in the public sector.
When asked what procurement entails, many people think of a competitive solicitation process, which often involves a review followed by a reward decision.. Once a use case for AI has been identified, a government initiates a solicitation process where they outline their needs, and invite vendors to submit proposals (a “Request for Proposal”, or RFP). City employees then follow structured review processes to score vendors’ proposed AI systems, and select a winner. The city and awarded vendor negotiate a contract that specifies obligations for each party, such as an agreed price for a specified time period. In some cities (but not others), all contracts must be approved in a public city council meeting.
Today, most efforts to improve AI procurement target steps in this conventional solicitation process. Groups like the World Economic Forum have published resources to help governments include responsible AI considerations into RFPs and contract templates.
But as we’ve seen, many AI systems bypass the formal solicitation process altogether. Instead, cities often make use of alternative purchasing pathways. For example, procurement law typically allows small-dollar purchases to skip competitive bidding. Employees can instead buy low cost AI tools using government-issued purchasing cards.
Other alternative purchasing pathways include AI donated by companies, acquired through university partnerships, or freely available to the public, like ChatGPT. Vendors are increasingly rolling out new AI features into their existing contracts, without notifying the public or city staff. The result is that most available resources designed to support responsible AI procurement are not applicable to the majority of AI acquisitions today.
While competitive solicitations offer several benefits to promoting responsible AI governance, many city employees view them as inefficient and cumbersome. Instead, many employees make use of alternative purchasing pathways when acquiring AI. This raises a key question: how might local governments establish consistent AI governance norms when most tools are acquired outside of the formal solicitation process? Answering this question requires looking more closely at who is involved in each type of acquisition.
How local governments organize and staff their procurements
Across interviewed cities, one of the clearest divides was in which city employees were brought in to oversee each AI acquisition. Some interviewed cities had established fully centralized oversight processes where every software acquisition — AI included — must pass through IT staff who can vet it for quality and risk. In contrast, other cities were largely decentralized, giving individual departments like police, fire, and schools free reign to manage their own IT portfolio.
These governance arrangements have real implications for oversight capacity — and suggest that a one-size-fits-all reform approach is unlikely to succeed. Some cities have started adopting centralized reviews that require “AI experts” trained to assess AI risks into every acquisition, enabling more consistent oversight. In contrast, cities with histories of decentralized IT governance face two paths: either train individual departments to assess AI risks, or reconfigure existing procurement workflows to establish centralized reviews to ensure minimum ethical standards are met.
Open questions looking ahead
Advocates have long recognized the potential of public procurement to serve as a gatekeeping role in determining which technologies are acquired and deployed. The past year has marked an especially exciting time for local governments who have started to integrate responsible AI considerations into their existing public procurement practices through grassroots organizations such as the Government AI Coalition. Our team’s research, published at the 2025 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, adds a missing layer to the existing conversation on AI procurement by surfacing how AI procurement actually works in practice.
Our research raises key questions that local governments will need to grapple with to establish effective oversight for all AI acquisitions:
- How can local governments stand up oversight and review processes for AI proposals that may bypass the conventional solicitation process?
- Who within a government has the capacity and leverage to be responsible for identifying and managing the risks posed by procured AI technology?
- How might existing procurement workflows be restructured to ensure that the right people are brought in to conduct meaningful evaluation of proposed AI solutions?
We anticipate there’s no one-size-fits-all model for how local governments should structure their procurement processes to promote responsible procurement and governance of AI. But this moment offers a rare opportunity for policy experts, researchers, and advocates to come together to reshape AI procurement (for example, to center residents’ input and participation). Public procurement is where some of the most consequential decisions about public sector AI are made. If we want to understand why an AI system is adopted — and whose interests it serves — we must begin by looking at how it was acquired in the first place.
Acknowledgements: Co-authors Beth Schwanke, Ravit Dotan, Harrison Leon, and Motahhare Eslami contributed to this research.
Jeff Kirk
Robots & Pencils, an AI-first, global digital innovation firm specializing in cloud-native web, mobile, and app modernization, today announced the executive appointment of Jeff Kirk as Executive Vice President of Applied AI. A seasoned technology leader with a career spanning global agencies, startups, and Fortune 100 enterprises, Kirk steps into this newly created role to accelerate the firm’s AI-first vision and unlock transformative outcomes for clients. As EVP of Applied AI, Kirk will lead the firm’s strategy and delivery of AI-powered and enterprise AI solutions across industries.
Explore how Robots & Pencils blends science and design to build market leaders.
Kirk’s track record speaks for itself, with AI breakthroughs that fueled customer engagement and business growth. He founded and scaled Moonshot, an intelligent digital products company later acquired by Pactera, where he spearheaded next-generation experiences in voice, augmented reality, and enterprise digitalization. At Amazon, he served as International Product & Technology Lead for Alexa, driving AI-powered personal assistant expansion to millions of households and users worldwide. Most recently, at bswift, Kirk led AI & Data as VP, delivering conversational AI breakthroughs with the award-winning Emma assistant and GenAI-powered EnrollPro decision support system.
Across each of these roles runs a common thread. Kirk builds and scales innovations that transform how industries work, creating technologies that move from experimental to essential at breathtaking speed.
“Jeff has been at the frontier of every major shift in digital innovation,” said Len Pagon, CEO of Robots & Pencils. “From shaping the future of eCommerce and mobile platforms at Brulant and Rosetta, to pioneering global voice AI at Amazon, to launching AI-driven customer experiences at bswift, Jeff has consistently delivered what’s next. He doesn’t just talk about AI. He builds products that millions use every day. With Jeff at the helm of Applied AI, Robots & Pencils is sharpening its challenger edge, helping clients leap ahead while legacy consultancies struggle to catch up. I’m energized by what this means for our clients and inspired by what it means for our people.”
Across two decades, Kirk has built a reputation for translating complex business requirements into enterprise-grade AI and technology solutions that scale, stick, and generate measurable results. His entrepreneurial mindset and hands-on leadership style uniquely position him to help clients experiment, activate, and operate AI across their businesses.
“Organizations and their employees are under pressure to innovate on behalf of customers while simultaneously learning to collaborate with a new type of co-worker: artificial intelligence,” said Kirk. “The steps we take together to learn to work differently will lead to the most outsized innovation in our industries. I’m thrilled to join Robots & Pencils to push the boundaries of what’s possible with AI, to deliver outcomes that matter for our clients and their customers, and to create opportunities for our teams to do the most meaningful work of their careers.”
Kirk began his career at Brulant and Rosetta, where he worked alongside Pagon and other Robots & Pencils’ executive team members, leading engineering and solutions architecture across content, commerce, mobile, and social platforms. His return to the fold marks both a reunion and a reinvention, positioning Robots & Pencils as a leader in applied AI at scale.
About Robots & Pencils
Robots & Pencils is a global digital innovation firm helping organizations modernize applications and unlock the full potential of AI, cloud-native technologies. With delivery centers in Canada, the U.S., Eastern Europe, and Latin America, and deep partnerships with AWS, Salesforce, Databricks, and others, the company offers a unique combination of UX excellence and elite engineering talent. Since 2009, Robots & Pencils has delivered forward-thinking solutions across Financial Services, Health Tech, Education, Consumer, Energy, and Technology sectors, earning a reputation as a nimble, high-value alternative to traditional global systems integrators. Visit us at robotsandpencils.com.
People mostly yawned through Apple’s new product lineup unveiled this week. It’s hard to get jazzed about the two millimeters of pocket space reclaimed by the thinner model.
But live-translating AirPods are one of the more exciting and tangible uses of AI I’ve seen so far. They foreshadow AI that doesn’t just make things cheaper, but makes entirely new things possible.
The new AirPods are a concrete example of something I’ve had trouble envisioning, 18 months into this hype cycle. It’s easy enough to see the cost savings from AI as technology replaces humans. But by PWC’s estimate, two-thirds of AI’s contributions to global economic growth will come not from gains in productivity but from gains in consumption. In this vision, AI will spark the creation of more goods that people want to buy, and make them available to more people.
Railroads didn’t just reduce the cost of shipping goods; they opened the West. Fiber-optic cable didn’t simply make communication easier, but birthed the internet. Transformative technologies create bigger pies, not just cheaper ones.
Language barriers act as invisible tariffs on the global economy. They add friction to financial markets, artificially constrain talent pools, and leave money stranded on the wrong side of comprehension. Flip that switch, and suddenly every market becomes accessible, and good ideas trapped behind a language wall get unleashed. Goldman Sachs can deploy its sharpest minds in Brazil without Portuguese fluency. My failed hunt for custom blazers in Hong Kong last year can become a completed transaction. (Also: tips for next time, please.) Netflix’s “localization” model becomes possible for new industries.
There’s something dystopian about a world where everyone is sporting AirPods all the time, but I suspect the future is heavy on wearables anyway. The question is whether that hardware expands or merely entertains. Technology that opens up new avenues meets the hype in a way that AI replacing baby investment bankers or advertising studios just doesn’t.
When Alfredo Vaamonde talks about the future of recruiting, he’s quick to clarify one thing: he doesn’t see artificial intelligence as a replacement for recruiters. Instead, he sees it as their partner.
“Our focus is to empower recruiters, not replace them,” Vaamonde told Refresh Miami. “That’s why our company is called MissionHires.”
The Miami-based startup, co-founded by Vaamonde and his wife, Mariana Escolar, automates up to 80% of the hiring process – from sourcing candidates to screening and initial engagement – so recruiters can focus on what matters: connecting with top candidates and making better hiring decisions.
For recruiting and staffing agencies, that efficiency translates into saved time and reduced costs. Instead of paying placement fees of 15–25% of a candidate’s salary, MissionHires offers flat-fee, retainer-based pricing.
“We’re quick, we’re focused on quality, and we’re very cost-efficient,” Vaamonde said.
The company has recently shifted its focus toward staffing and recruiting firms rather than only individual employers. That move has given MissionHires recurring business, with agencies using the platform month after month to support their teams. Healthcare companies and startups remain key clients too, but agencies now represent the biggest growth opportunity.
The technology itself is designed to be simple for recruiters to adopt. After posting a job description, the AI creates an ideal candidate profile, finds both active and passive candidates, and reaches out to them across email, text, or LinkedIn. When candidates respond, they go through a 15–20 minute chat-based interview, where the AI can collect text, audio, or video responses depending on the client’s preference. The system then generates a detailed report with skills, strengths, and any flagged areas for review. Recruiters walk away with a shortlist of pre-screened candidates, ready for live interviews.
“We’re taking the manual, repetitive tasks off their plate so they can be more efficient and place people faster,” Vaamonde explained. That means more time spent actually engaging candidates and less time slogging through inboxes and resumes.
Since launching in January, MissionHires has been averaging about $10,000 in monthly revenue. The team remains lean – just four people, including the husband-and-wife founding duo – but the vision is big. Vaamonde sees MissionHires as industry-agnostic, built to empower staffing agencies, recruiters, and hiring teams anywhere in the world.
That perspective is rooted in Vaamonde’s international experience. After spending the past two years living in Madrid with his family, he moved back to Miami this summer to double down on building MissionHires. The return has given him a fresh look at how much the city has changed since his last company, Papa, was founded here.
“In 2018, nobody was here,” he said. “We were actually pressured by YC to stay in San Francisco, but we chose Miami because this is where our clients were. Back then, there wasn’t really a tech ecosystem.”
Now, he said, Miami is buzzing with entrepreneurial energy. “Just in the past two weeks, I’ve had breakfast and dinner with founders who had moved here from New York and California. That didn’t exist five years ago.”
Still, Vaamonde sees room for growth. He’d like to see more founders born and raised in Miami leading startups. “Most of the entrepreneurs you meet here today are transplants,” he said. “We need more local talent building businesses from the ground up.” He believes universities and large companies will play a crucial role in fostering that next generation of Miami-grown founders.
Pictured above: Alfredo Vaamonde and Mariana Escolar, co-founders of MissionHires
READ MORE IN REFRESH MIAMI:
-
Business2 weeks agoThe Guardian view on Trump and the Fed: independence is no substitute for accountability | Editorial
-
Tools & Platforms1 month ago
Building Trust in Military AI Starts with Opening the Black Box – War on the Rocks
-
Ethics & Policy2 months agoSDAIA Supports Saudi Arabia’s Leadership in Shaping Global AI Ethics, Policy, and Research – وكالة الأنباء السعودية
-
Events & Conferences4 months agoJourney to 1000 models: Scaling Instagram’s recommendation system
-
Jobs & Careers2 months agoMumbai-based Perplexity Alternative Has 60k+ Users Without Funding
-
Podcasts & Talks2 months agoHappy 4th of July! 🎆 Made with Veo 3 in Gemini
-
Education2 months agoMacron says UK and France have duty to tackle illegal migration ‘with humanity, solidarity and firmness’ – UK politics live | Politics
-
Education2 months agoVEX Robotics launches AI-powered classroom robotics system
-
Funding & Business2 months agoKayak and Expedia race to build AI travel agents that turn social posts into itineraries
-
Podcasts & Talks2 months agoOpenAI 🤝 @teamganassi