Most of us who have spent our entire careers in private industry have no experience with what is involved in bidding on/winning government contracts. So I dug in a bit recently, with the help of ChatGPT. One of my hypotheses is that you can use ChatGPT to make applying for government contracts easier.
1/ I started by asking ChatGPT how I could go about applying for New York State government contracts
2/ Following the instructions, I went to https://www.nyscr.ny.gov/business/adsOpenMyOpps.cfm and registered as an entity. Once I was able to log in, I could browse for contracting opportunities. When I filtered in the “Administrative/Technical” category, one of the first opportunities I saw was a request for Transcription Services from Nassau County.
3/ Clicking on this ad gave a quick overview of the service with some preliminary information
4/ Now, to the RFP. (I’m slightly horrified that this is how our government is run). This is kind of insane bloat, given that I literally pay $10/month for Fireflies.ai for transcription services and can access it immediately.
5/ Alright, let’s see how well ChatGPT can write a response to this RFP. Note that the RFP already prescribed the desired structure of the response, so I pull that out explicitly.