To provide a faster, more comprehensive, and more intelligent budget execution and project management tool for improved leadership visibility and streamlined financial reporting, the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) launched its Enterprise Workflow and Reporting Platform (eWARP) project in February and awarded three contracts to commercial AI providers.
“DIU needs accurate and on demand knowledge of the status of our projects to share with DoD leadership, our DoD partners, and Congress,” said Jaime Fitzgibbon, AI program manager and contractor. “The goal of this project is to transform insight gathering from manual spreadsheet drudgery into an intelligent, responsive system. By harnessing AI and large language models, we're deploying a solution that not only accelerates the discovery of insights but also establishes accountability through automated precision.”
Accountable budget execution paired with effective project management is essential for aligning resources, vendors, and outcomes with DIU’s overarching goal of accelerating the adoption of cutting-edge technologies within the Department of Defense. Current systems lack the comprehensive integration and visibility required to track milestones, manage vendor contracts, and monitor performance across multiple projects, creating gaps that hinder mission effectiveness.
In response to this challenge, DIU sought a solution that relies on AI to coordinate budget planning efforts as well as track incoming funding, contract modifications, and real-time status updates. DIU prioritized solutions that could:
Easily ingest and/or integrate with pre-existing program data;
Populate program updates and auto-recommendations in near-real-time based on milestones and user actions (e.g., new funding arrival, expiring deadline, vendor invoice, or milestone completion);
Summarize program status;
Configure productivity tools to support collaboration across user personas and access levels;
Aggregate and visualize program maturity and resource allocation across technology areas and portfolios; and
Manage data, security, backup, and recovery plans to safeguard sensitive program data.
After a competitive commercial solutions opening (CSO), DIU selected three company solutions - CORAS, GovSignals, and Pryzm - to move forward into the prototyping phase:
CORAS will develop a centralized platform of AI-powered, configurable no-code components to integrate financial tracking, milestone oversight, and vendor management into a single project and financial management system.
GovSignals is partnering with Unstructured to provide a user-friendly platform that ingests datasets in differing formats, supports multiple enterprise personas, accelerates information sharing, and adapts to evolving mission requirements. GovSignals and Unstructured will pair unstructured data parsing with a flexible acquisition AI model.
Pryzm Dynamics Inc. will deliver an AI-powered, centralized platform to streamline financial, contract, and project management; facilitate collaboration; and support leadership reporting of project status. Pryzm is an acquisition intelligence and customer relationship management platform that securely combines public government data with federal or commercial organizations’ proprietary data.
All vendors will aim to develop platforms that will enable DIU to rapidly adapt, improve operations, automate tasks, and eliminate the onerous manual work needed for effective program and financial management.