OneGov deals helping expand agencies’ AI adoption, GSA official says
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Zach Whitman, GSA's chief AI officer and data scientist, said the OneGov initiative “has provided a procurement pathway for a lot of these agencies who may have had early, light contact with some of these technologies.”
The General Services Administration’s OneGov initiative provides the federal government with a new way to onboard artificial intelligence tools, a top agency official said during GovCIO’s AI summit on Friday.
GSA launched its OneGov strategy in April 2025 to offer agencies discounted rates on select private sector technology and software services by treating the government as one customer. More than a dozen companies — including Microsoft, SAP and xAI — have reached deals with GSA so far to offer significant discounts on select products.
In response to a question from Nextgov/FCW about how the initiative is helping to bring more AI tools into government, GSA Chief AI Officer and Data Scientist Zach Whitman said that, for those "wanting to see some level of adoption for experimentation purposes on low-risk use cases, this has provided a procurement pathway for a lot of these agencies who may have had early, light contact with some of these technologies.”
He added: “We want to make sure that these technologies do not appear so distinct to normal federal procurement eyes that, ‘Well, maybe we'll get to that later.’ We want to make it available."
GSA announced on Thursday that it reached a OneGov deal with Cohesity, which provides AI-powered data security solutions. In a statement announcing the agreement, Federal Acquisition Service Commissioner Josh Gruenbaum said the deal “will strengthen and enable robust and secure AI infrastructure across the federal government, directly supporting President [Donald] Trump’s call for America to win the AI race.”
That agreement came after GSA reached a similar deal with Meta to provide agencies with discounted access to its open source AI models, as well as with ServiceNow to also provide significant cuts to the cost of its AI platform and an assortment of agentic AI capabilities.
Whitman said the OneGov agreements “have been used, I think, primarily as a way to focus attention on, ‘Here are some options that we'd love for you to consider’ — you being these agencies and possibly the general procurement space.”
Many of the OneGov deals have set expiration dates, although senior GSA procurement officials have said they expect the initiative will help create lasting partnerships with industry.
GSA also launched a governmentwide AI testing platform in August 2025 to help agencies experiment with and adopt a host of tools. Known as USAi, the tool aligns with some of the priorities outlined in the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan released last July that called, in part, for the development of an AI evaluation suite.