Government Contracting Is Too Important to Be This Slow

Published: May 5, 2026

The federal government obligated $755 billion through contracts in FY2024.

That is not back-office paperwork. That is mission delivery, supplier performance, public trust, and taxpayer money moving through procurement and contract management processes every day.¹

In FY2024, agencies spent more than $495 billion alone on common products and services. This is the exact category of spend where better procurement coordination, supplier visibility, category management, and contract oversight can create meaningful savings.²

$755B in federal contract obligations. $495B+ in common goods and services. Too much of the work still depends on people manually finding, checking, routing, and reconciling information.

But inside many agencies, the work still moves through incomplete intake packets, manually reviewed bids, disconnected systems, static PDFs, supplier records, approval queues, and contract terms buried across hundreds of pages.

Your mission has moved forward. Your processes have not.

In two recent Q&A sessions, myself and Carahsoft expert Alec Wyhs looked at what is slowing government procurement and contract management down, and where automation and AI can help agencies move faster without losing control.

Procurement Reform Will Not Work if the Work Underneath Stays Manual

There is real momentum around improving how government buys. GAO has reported that category management is intended to help agencies buy like a single enterprise, reduce duplicative contracts, use federal buying power, and save taxpayer dollars.²

But procurement reform cannot succeed on policy alone.

In our recent discussion on government procurement, Alec Wyhs of Carahsoft points to a painful reality: roughly 20% of bids submitted to government may be non-compliant because the vendor community and the government are not always aligned on what is needed.³

In a procurement environment already measured in months or years, those breakdowns compound fast.

When Contract Management Becomes a Search Problem

Contract management is often described as a lifecycle: create, review, approve, execute, manage, renew, close out. In practice, government contract management can feel more like a search and rescue operation.

Teams need to answer basic questions quickly:

Where is the latest version?
Which supplier is attached to which contract?
What terms apply?
Has the compliance review been completed?
Which obligations are still open?
Can we prove what happened, when it happened, and who approved it?

"Contract management should not feel like searching for a needle in a haystack where the haystack is the size of the United States."

Today, agencies are citing buying times of roughly 18 months for certain government contract vehicles.⁴ That should not be accepted as the cost of doing government work.

It should be treated as a warning sign.

What Changes When Procurement and Contracts Are Automated

The biggest delays often happen in visibility and handoffs. A missing field or typo slows review. A clause gets buried in a PDF. An approval sits in the wrong queue. A supplier or contract detail must be checked against another system. None of these issues feel big on their own, but together they slow the path from request to award to contract execution.

In my recent Q&A with Carahsoft, I cited an opportunity to reduce contract execution time by roughly 30% to 40% with agentic document processing, bringing timelines from more than 30 days to under 10 days or less in some cases.³

Today’s Friction	What Automation + AI Improve
Manual intake and rekeyed vendor data	Standardized intake, routing, and data capture
Delayed approvals and incomplete bid packages	Earlier detection of missing or inconsistent information
Late-stage compliance checks	Human review focused on exceptions and judgment
Limited visibility into bottlenecks and contract status	Audit-ready evidence and better visibility into cycle time, workload, supplier activity, and risk

The goal is not to take people out of the process. It is to remove the drag that keeps procurement, legal, finance, security, and program teams from making timely, confident decisions.

AI Is Not the Strategy. Trusted Data Is.

Government leaders are right to be cautious about AI. AI can accelerate decisions only if the information feeding it is accurate, governed, and explainable. If contract and procurement data is incomplete, inconsistent, or trapped in unstructured content, AI becomes another layer on top of a weak foundation.

AI should not remove judgment from government workflows. It should remove the repetitive work that keeps people from exercising it.

AI readiness starts with turning unstructured documents into trusted, compliant, AI-ready data. For procurement and contract teams, that means data that is structured, verified, searchable, traceable, governed, and ready to move into workflows, dashboards, reports, and downstream systems.

For federal agencies, that foundation also must meet strict security requirements. Tungsten TotalAgility Cloud’s FedRAMP High ATO gives agencies a secure path to modernize document and workflow automation in high-impact environments.

Tungsten’s responsible AI framework emphasizes human-centric design, fairness, transparency, explainability, safety, accountability, compliance, data privacy, and cybersecurity. It also outlines ongoing risk assessments, internal audits, responsible AI testing, and post-deployment monitoring.⁵

Modernization Does Not Have to Mean Starting Over

I often hear a common reason why government modernization stalls is that agencies assume meaningful change requires a massive replacement effort. That is not realistic for many teams. Legacy systems still run critical operations, and the people closest to the work cannot pause mission delivery while a new operating model is built around them.

Agencies should start where friction is highest: high-volume contract intake, supplier onboarding, bid package review, purchase request approvals, contract clause extraction, invoice and contract matching, compliance evidence collection, or renewal and obligation tracking.

Tungsten solutions are built around this reality: secure automation that fits existing agency systems, policies, and pace, with industry-leading intelligent document processing, workflow automation, AI agents, low-code/no-code applications, security and audit capabilities, and integration into current environments.

The Work Is Too Important to Stay This Slow

Government contract management and procurement management will always require rigor. They should. The stakes are too high for shortcuts.

But rigor should not mean unnecessary friction.

The future of government procurement and contract management is not just faster buying. It is more confident buying: more confidence that requirements are clear, vendors have submitted what is needed, approvals are moving, contract terms are understood, data can be trusted, and the agency can prove what happened.

Government teams are not asking for AI and automation tools because it’s exciting. They need it because the current way of working asks too much of people and delivers too little visibility in return.

Go Deeper: Read the Full Expert Q&As

References

by John Beglan Director, Sales - Public Sector