# AI for Federal Acquisition & Contracting Course (Self-Paced) Canonical URL: ## Overview AI for Federal Acquisition & Contracting is a practical, skills focused course designed specifically for federal acquisition professionals. Rather than offering a general overview of artificial intelligence, this course concentrates on the concepts, tools, and guardrails most relevant to contracting officers, contract specialists, CORs, and acquisition teams. The course begins with a clear, non-technical understanding of how AI tools, such as large language models, work and how they are being adopted across the federal landscape. It emphasizes responsible AI use, including the protection of Personally Identifiable Information, Controlled Unclassified Information, and contractor proprietary data, as well as compliance with agency acceptable use policies and evolving federal guidance. The core of the course focuses on applying AI to real acquisition tasks. Learners practice drafting and refining Performance Work Statements and Statements of Work, generating structured requirements documents, conducting AI assisted market research aligned with FAR guidance, and developing evaluation criteria. Hands on exercises and a capstone scenario reinforce iterative prompting, human in the loop review, and quality control techniques to ensure outputs are accurate, compliant, and professionally sound. By the end of the course, learners leave with a reusable toolkit of prompts, templates, and best practices that can be applied immediately in their agency environment, regardless of which approved AI platform they use. ## What you'll learn - Define artificial intelligence and distinguish between key AI technologies relevant to acquisition work. - Identify responsible AI use practices for the federal acquisition environment, including PII and CUI safeguards and agency policy compliance. - Use AI to draft and refine Performance Work Statements (PWSs) and Statements of Work (SOWs) that align with FAR requirements. - Generate and validate acquisition requirements documents using AI assisted prompting techniques. - Conduct AI assisted market research to support acquisition planning and vendor identification. - Apply a structured prompt engineering approach to produce consistent, high quality acquisition outputs. - Evaluate AI generated content for accuracy, compliance, and suitability before incorporating it into official procurement documents. ## Curriculum #### Module 1: AI Foundations for the Acquisition Professional (Approx. 50 minutes) - Define key AI terms relevant to acquisition work, including large language models, generative AI, prompts, tokens, and hallucinations. - Describe, at a high level, how large language models generate text in a non-technical way. - Recognize how AI is being adopted across the federal landscape, including OMB guidance and the evolving policy environment. - Apply responsible AI practices to protect PII, CUI, and contractor proprietary information. - Identify AI limitations such as hallucinations, bias, and confidentiality risks, and explain why human review is required. - Locate and follow agency acceptable use policies for AI tools. - Hands-On Activity: AI Guardrails Check, identify sensitive data in an acquisition scenario and rewrite prompts to remove restricted information. #### Module 2: Drafting Performance Work Statements and Statements of Work with AI (Approx. 60 minutes) - Compare performance work statements and statements of work, and identify when each is appropriate, with a brief reference to FAR Part 37. - Build effective prompts for acquisition documents using context, constraints, and formatting instructions. - Structure prompts for common PWS sections, including objectives, scope, tasks, deliverables, performance standards, and quality assurance. - Use iterative follow up prompting to improve, expand, and reorganize AI generated drafts. - Recognize common pitfalls such as generic language, missing compliance elements, and over reliance on AI outputs. - Apply a human in the loop review checklist to validate AI assisted acquisition document drafts. - Hands-On Activity: Draft a PWS Section, generate a section from a scenario and refine the output through review and improvement. #### Module 3: AI Assisted Requirements Generation and Market Research (Approx. 60 minutes) - Generate and organize functional and technical requirements based on stakeholder inputs. - Use AI to support market research activities, including identifying potential vendors, summarizing capabilities, and drafting market research narratives, with a brief reference to FAR Part 10. - Draft evaluation criteria and rating scales with AI support. - Develop an IGCE framework and create prompts to support pricing research. - Apply prompt strategies to convert vague needs into structured and actionable requirements. - Perform quality control by cross checking AI generated outputs against program objectives and FAR compliance. - Hands-On Activity: Requirements Generator, produce requirements, a market research summary, and draft evaluation factors using an iterative prompt and refine workflow. #### Module 4: Putting It All Together, Capstone Exercise and Toolkit (Approx. 50 minutes) - Apply an end to end workflow that uses AI to support acquisition planning and documentation. - Build a reusable personal prompt library for PWS, SOW, requirements, market research, and evaluation criteria. - Identify change management considerations for introducing AI tools to an acquisition team. - Use resources to stay current on evolving federal AI policy and acquisition related AI developments. - Summarize key takeaways and apply best practices through discussion and Q and A. - Capstone Activity: Mini Acquisition Package, create a small documentation package including a PWS or SOW section, key requirements, and draft evaluation criteria, then present for peer and instructor feedback. ## Instructors ### Steve Pesklo — Instructor Steve is an energetic trainer who focuses on applying technical concepts to everyday work practices. He is the founder and president of SoftLake Solutions, a company that specializes in providing data and AI applications to identify fraud for Internal Audit, Criminal Investigations, Forensic Accounting, Privacy, and Compliance. Steve brings a large amount of experience across multiple industries and government agencies. He is an expert in implementing large data analysis projects across the world, including Inland Revenue in the UK and Argentina, New Zealand, Africa and across Europe. Previously, he was the manager of Data Architecture and Data Services for a large mortgage company. He is a frequent speaker on data analytics and project management topics and speaks fluent German. He has been teaching at the Graduate School for over 10 years. Steve has an M.B.A. from the University of St. Thomas and a B.S. in Computer Science from California Lutheran University and the Universität Salzburg in Austria. He is certified as a Certified Fraud Examiner (CFE), Project Management Professional (PMP), and a Certified ScrumMaster (CSM). ## Pricing **Tuition:** $675