Koniag Government Services and AWS Transform U.S. Army Procurement through Intelligent Automation

Koniag Government Services (KGS), a highly specialized AWS Partner, helped the U.S. Army’s procurement community overcome overwhelming workload and manual, compliance-heavy processes. Working with the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for Procurement, KGS built automation and AI tools including the Determination of Responsibility Assistant (DORA) bot. It also built a suite of Amazon Bedrock–powered “Jumpstarter” document generators to streamline contracting tasks that once took hours.

With these solutions, the U.S. Army is saving 687,000 labor hours annually and achieving $37 million in cost avoidance, while accelerating procurement timelines, improving compliance, and advancing secure, scalable AI adoption across the U.S. Department of War.

Helping the U.S. Army Overcome Procurement Challenges 

Koniag Government Services (KGS) is an Alaska Native Corporation with a long history of delivering enterprise solutions to the federal government. With deep technical expertise spanning AI, cloud services, DevSecOps, cybersecurity, and intelligent automation, KGS operates across more than 80 federal organizations and manages over 280 active contracts. 

As an Advanced Tier AWS Partner holding Government, Migration, and AI Specializations, KGS has distinguished itself by being verified for its advanced technical capabilities. According to Paul Williams, Vice President of Solutions, Koniag Government Services, KGS is one of the only disadvantaged businesses in the country that holds the AI Specialization from Amazon Web Services, and it has executed more than $250 million in AI-focused federal contracts. “AWS has been an essential technology backbone for us,” says Williams. “We use AWS to host, integrate, and orchestrate our automation solutions securely, which gives our federal customers confidence that the technology will scale and perform at mission speed.” 

KGS’s combination of cloud expertise, AI innovation, and federal mission understanding positioned it to support one of its most impactful customers: the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for Procurement (ODASA(P)). When ODASA(P) engaged KGS, the Army’s contracting workforce faces persistent challenges: too much work, too few people, and too many manual processes. Contracting professionals are responsible for navigating complex compliance requirements, interpreting the Federal Acquisition Regulation and the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement, and managing high-stakes procurement decisions under intense time pressure. Contracting officers are personally accountable for compliance and accuracy, yet often lack standardized tools, codified processes, or workflow management systems. 

This environment creates administrative burdens and process complexity, which in turn extend procurement timelines.

Automating Critical Acquisition Processes with AWS AI Solutions

One of the first and most impactful challenges ODASA(P) asked KGS to address was the Determination of Responsibility, a mandatory step in which contracting professionals assess whether a prospective vendor is “responsible” and eligible to receive federal work. This determination requires gathering and analyzing data from the System for Award Management (SAM.gov) and other sources, checking for issues such as delinquent taxes, exclusions, or compliance violations. Manually, the process took roughly an hour each time and has to be repeated at multiple stages of the acquisition lifecycle.

KGS responded by developing the Determination of Responsibility Assistant (DORA), an intelligent automation solution that dramatically accelerates this process. DORA operates as an automation bot running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides the always-on compute environment needed to process requests 24/7. KGS also takes advantage of Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for document storage and AWS Lambda and AWS Step Functions for supporting modular tasks in other related automations.

DORA performs the initial review of a contractor’s responsibility status by using data from SAM.gov. Contracting professionals simply send an email to DORA with the vendor’s Unique Entity Identifier (UEI) in the subject line. From there, DORA automatically pulls all relevant compliance data using multiple APIs, analyzes the results through pre-built decisioning algorithms that mimic human judgment, and produces a formatted report that’s ready for review and determination. 

Following the success of DORA, ODASA(P) tasked KGS with extending its automation framework across other parts of the acquisition lifecycle. KGS began developing a suite of “Jumpstarter” applications that use Amazon Bedrock and large language models (LLMs) to draft key contracting documents automatically. One notable example is the Justification and Approval (J&A) Jumpstarter, which assists in preparing a justification for an exception to open competition. Writing these documents manually often took hours of cut-and-paste work from multiple source documents, organizing the information into the correct template and providing supporting justification for the request. 

With the J&A Jumpstarter, users can now generate an AI-assisted first draft by submitting basic inputs. Building on this approach, the Performance Work Statement (PWS) Jumpstarter, leverages generative AI to rapidly produce initial drafts of PWS documents, reducing days of manual drafting down to minutes and further streamlining the document creation process. Together, these Jumpstarters demonstrate a scalable solution for accelerating the generation of a wide range of acquisition documents. “Our AI models, hosted through Amazon Bedrock, generate the initial draft sections of very complex documents,” says Carin Chapman, Vice President of AI Strategy and Enablement, Koniag Government Services. “We break down the prompts into smaller, structured segments to make sure the model returns precise, relevant sections that users can refine and approve. It’s about accuracy first and speed second.” 

ODASA(P) now uses a mix of non-AI and AI-enabled automations across dozens of workflows, each one running securely within AWS infrastructure. These include chatbots that answer contracting regulation questions, compliance monitoring bots that ensure mandatory report submissions, and notification systems that keep contracting professionals informed of status. In total, KGS has delivered more than 150 automated workflows for ODASA(P) and continues to expand the portfolio.

Enabling Time Savings, Cost Reduction, and Enterprise-wide Transformation

DORA’s impact was immediate. By reducing a one-hour task to just 2 minutes, the Army Contracting Enterprise gained back hours of productivity. “DORA gathers, adjudicates, and assembles the data into a legally compliant, standardized document,” says Chapman. “It doesn’t replace the professional. It gives them back nearly an hour each time to focus on higher-value analysis and oversight.”

Additionally, the Army Contracting Enterprise is now saving 687,000 hours per year through KGS’s automation tools, representing about $37 million in annual cost avoidance. Moreover, continually working to reduce Procurement Acquisition Lead Time (PALT)—the interval from solicitation to award—directly contributes to the Army’s goal of delivering capabilities to soldiers faster. “Reducing PALT is always a central focus,” Chapman says. “Every day saved in contracting helps accelerate the fielding of technologies and services to the warfighter.”  The team’s achievements were recognized with the 2026 ACT-IAC Innovation Impact Award, selected from over 120 submissions across the federal sector.

The collaboration with ODASA(P) also helped KGS open the door to new initiatives with other Department of War organizations. Among them is its work with the U.S. Army Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO)’s Wingman Program, which provides automation and AI development environments across the DoW. Wingman runs entirely on AWS, using Amazon WorkSpaces as secure, isolated virtual development environments.  “The work we’re doing for CDAO is a natural extension of what we started with ODASA(P),” Chapman says. “It’s all about building repeatable, secure AI architectures on AWS that empower government teams to move faster with confidence.”

More recently, KGS created a solution for the U.S. Army Center of Military History’s Army Historical Resources Online (AHRO) Classified system, which supports Army historians and analysts. The system manages more than 100 million digital historical records (over 150 TB of data) and offers users the ability to search through documents using AI-powered semantic search. It has a forthcoming Amazon Bedrock–based AI chatbot that will let users pose questions in natural language and receive answers in seconds.

Looking forward, KGS plans to deepen its use of the AWS generative AI ecosystem to continue its mission of accelerating government modernization. “Every step of our journey has been about partnership and progression,” says Williams. “AWS is a true enabler for us, helping us move rapidly from concept to production, while giving our customers the security and compliance guarantees they expect.”

• Amazon Bedrock
• AWS Lambda
• AWS Step Functions
• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud