Oklahoma’s new AI watches procurement for filing errors

The State of Oklahoma on Tuesday joined a growing number of states using artificial intelligence to streamline procurement processes — to reduce filing errors, increase efficiency and better monitor how taxpayer money is spent.

The Office of Management Enterprise Services, responsible for managing statewide procurement efforts in Oklahoma, announced it recently deployed Process Copilot, a generative AI platform from the German software service firm Celonis that flags mistakes in submission forms, such as missing vendor contracts or including the wrong type of procurement order.

According to the announcement, the platform helped OMES identify $190 million in flagged purchase card transactions across its 118 agencies, and identified $5.6 million in transactions that exposed ways for state agencies to implement better procurement system controls.

Janet Morrow, director of risk assessment and compliance at OMES, said the tool helps officials review procurement data within minutes, a task that enforcing procurement compliance and oversight that previously took years.

“In the past, the assessment team would conduct eight audits a year of agencies’ procurement, and that would take two to three years to complete,” Morrow said. “By the time an audit was completed and it’s two to three years later, you may have a change in leadership, that buyer may no longer be at that agency.”

Morrow said that because the tool flags issues automatically, procurement officers, who used to manually report each error, now have time focus on more complicated tasks.

“Initially we would, we would issue those flags via email,” Morrow said. “Once we were sure that we were getting 99% accuracy rate on our flags, it then automated that piece, so that same team of six individuals that took two to three years to audit eight agencies are able to step back so they can get into the weeds of procurement.”

Oklahoma recently faced scrutiny by the Legislative Office of Fiscal Transparency, which questioned whether agencies were abiding by the state’s Central Purchasing Act, a 2009 law that created OMES and standardized the procurement process with the goals of transparency, efficiency and fiscal responsibility.

After a review of state purchases, the state legislature discovered that its agencies had procured more than $3 billion worth of goods and services outside OMES oversight. Morrow said the new platform gives OMES visibility over more than 24,000 purchase orders winding through PeopleSoft, the state’s enterprise resource planning system.

“One of the things that we kind of had to dispel and explain to our partner agencies is Celonis isn’t working in our ERP platform PeopleSoft — they are pulling a data duplicate and it’s going into their tool, so they’re never touching our system, so there’s no risk of changes to our data,” Morrow said.

Last February, the Oklahoma’s AI task force submitted its final report to Gov. Kevin Stitt on how the state can adopt AI tools to make government more efficient. Morrow said the state chief information officer and chief information security officer, both members on the task force, were involved in initial meetings with Celonis, and established privacy parameters before she used Process Copilot.

“We take care of all the insurance placement for all state agencies and higher ed institutions, so that data piece for me every day is a very important thing,” Morrow said. “And while my role is typically reactive from an insurance perspective, it’s proactive in that if we didn’t have those governance and we didn’t have those controls, there’s no way we would be able to get coverage put in place.”

Morrow added that the early success of the procurement tool, including increased efficiency and saving money, may help win over AI skeptics within the government and lead to more adoption of similar tools.

“If your mission is taking care of care of children of the state of Oklahoma,” Morrow said, “if there’s a tool that can be in place to either help our constituents or help our employees get to the right answer as quickly as possible, so that again, that they can focus back on the mission of what their agency is — how do you not embrace that technology?”