Accenture Insights Platform for Government: Making Rapid, Scalable AI a Reality for Federal Agencies

From combatting fraud to predictive maintenance, it’s no secret that the federal government is striving to become more insight-driven. This is driving demand to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) into agency operations.

However, federal agencies face several nuanced challenges as they look to adopt these tools. For one, procurement constraints make it difficult to acquire the latest tools or test technology prior to purchase to ensure agencies are making the best use of budget. Moreover, critical skills and talent are often in short supply. AI-related hiring for data scientists, for example, has grown by 74% over the past 5 years, and it’s estimated that there are roughly triple the amount of job postings for data scientists as candidates. Finally, securing and certifying enterprise systems remains a costly undertaking.

These challenges will only increase as the pace of innovation around analytics continues to accelerate, with the underlying need for highly scalable cloud-based systems to manage this data.

How can agencies address these challenges in order to benefit from the insights that AI and ML tools offer? Enter the Accenture Insights Platform for Government, or AIP-IQ, which provides a path to quick-execution, scalable AI solutions. A commercially proven, federally accredited analytics-as-a-service platform, AIP-IQ helps agencies make use of the data they have to solve the problems they're facing today.

AIP-IQ is a cloud-based platform that integrates tools from more than 40 vendor partners. It makes available to agencies best-of-market tools, FedRAMP Moderate authorization and 24/7 security monitoring. So, instead of investing the time and budget to vet and acquire tools, certifications, and constantly ensure security patching and processes are up to date, agencies can simply begin executing AI and ML projects as the mission demands. Moreover, they can tap a vast network of Accenture’s experts and industry-leading partners to execute, scale and glean actionable insights along the way.

If it sounds like nothing you’ve heard of before, that’s because it is.

“There is no other product like this in the federal government,” says Bryan Rich, managing director of Applied Intelligence for Accenture Federal Services. "It's an environment-as-a-service that comes with tools that are just not available out of the box with any other product. The partner ecosystem doesn't exist in any of the other managed services in the federal market. It’s supported by a service center that follows and updates security protocols and is available to customers 24/7.”

Moreover, because customers are able to pull from a vast library of models, resources and expertise, they are able to not only stand up systems more quickly, but also in a more cost-effective way.

“AIP-IQ drives the cost of advanced data science down, because agencies are able to benefit from a proven platform and a network of highly skilled data scientists to solve a variety of problems,” says Rich. “Agencies can also take advantage of solution accelerators that can meet many of their needs out-of-the-box.”

Furthermore, the solution drives additional savings by decreasing the amount of time it takes to deliver outputs.

“Government users are able to consume and benefit from data more quickly as well as access insights on a more dynamic basis,” says Rich.

There’s perhaps no better example than the current COVID-19 pandemic to showcase both the opportunity and difficulty in integrating AI and ML programs quickly and effectively into federal agency operations. When the coronavirus pandemic hit in early 2020, government agencies everywhere looked to act quickly to provide constituents with the information and services they needed to stay safe and healthy. Data played a key role in tracking the virus and the efficacy of efforts to mitigate the spread. Agencies continue to rely heavily on these metrics to help disperse aid and decide when to begin reopening efforts.

As a result, agencies faced an immediate demand for real-time insight into the spread of the virus and its impacts. They needed to source new data and tools that would not only enable these types of insights but, with agencies encouraging employees to telework for their own health and safety, also allow them to work and collaborate remotely.

Agencies needed to access up-to-date, accurate metrics quickly and AIP-IQ was able to deliver.

“Accenture began working with federal agencies as early as January 2020 in order to bring together COVID-19 data sources around things like case tracking, global supply chain and other socioeconomic or demographic health indicators into a single API,” says Maggie Smith, analytics senior manager for Accenture Federal Services. “We brought it into the platform, built other data models on top of that and used it to predict the ways that cases might spread under different scenarios.”

Additionally, Accenture worked with federal agencies to deliver insights around when companies, states and businesses could reopen and share those insights through executive-level dashboards and visualizations.

“AIP-IQ is a tool that a government agency could use to rapidly get insight into COVID-19 status, integrate their own data sources and ultimately create better situational awareness and understanding around how the pandemic continues to evolve,” says Smith. “That would allow them to better understand and prepare for some of the choices or solutions they might need to make, both in real time and in the future."

Because AIP-IQ’s infrastructure was already standing, Accenture was able to work with several federal agencies to deliver these insights not just quickly, but in a scalable and cost-effective way. Agencies were able to build foundational dashboards and models so they could immediately monitor the virus, Rich notes, but the models aren’t static — as situations continue to change, agencies can bring in new data sources and information to scale and modify insights to fit more specific missions or use cases.

“In situations like COVID-19 where you have dynamic requirements for insight, AIP-IQ is perfectly suited to drive that network collaboration on the data science end, but also the product realization and the insight generation on the executive consumption side,” notes Rich.

Ultimately, with AIP-IQ, agency and IT leaders no longer have to worry about how they’ll make AI a reality, they simply have to think about how they want it to work for them. From there, Accenture’s vast network of data scientists, experts and tools can help make it happen.

“There's tremendous business value in collaboration,” says Rich. “We’re really creating a network effect around complex problem solving, which I think is a tremendous advantage of having an environment like AIP-IQ deployed. We're currently seeing multiple federal agencies using and sharing data in AIP-IQ that previously had no way of doing so, and no way to drive that collaboration and network. It’s tremendously valuable.”