AI Is Closing the Gap. Open the Door.
As both a contractor and a GS-15, I’ve written Authority to Operate packages. I’ve built and maintained the systems those ATOs protect. I’ve designed interfaces for federal users, led engineering teams inside and outside of government, and shipped production software. I’ve sat in the rooms where six-billion-dollar IT budgets get finalized.
And yet, when my company pursues a contract, the path narrows quickly. Evaluation criteria weight past performance at dollar thresholds we haven’t hit as a prime, and the company’s history over the team’s experience. Even with a strong technical approach, you’re rated lower because the entity is young. The guidance is consistent: go build your past performance through a partner.
I understand why. Zero tolerance for failure is the right instinct when you’re delivering services to veterans or managing national security infrastructure. But over time, that instinct has been translated into a proxy: if your company is new, you will fail. It doesn’t matter that the team has decades of federal experience. The corporate entity hasn’t done it at this dollar threshold. Go partner.
The partner pipeline
So you partner. The mentor-protege program and joint ventures are designed to do exactly that: pair small businesses with established primes, build past performance, then graduate companies that can compete independently.
Too often it doesn’t work that way. The larger company dictates the tools, the processes, the staffing, and the delivery culture, because they hold the contract and can revoke access at any time. You adopt the prime’s playbook, or you lose your seat.
By the time a small business “graduates,” it has been shaped into a version of the company it was supposed to be an alternative to. The government pays small business rates but gets large business culture. Meanwhile, the small business designation in IT services covers companies up to $34 million in annual revenue. Some have been “small businesses” for twenty years, with incumbent positions and past performance that make them nearly unbeatable.
When a solicitation is set aside for small business, the competition still isn’t between new approaches. It’s between established players and new entrants whose team experience doesn’t count because the entity is too young.
AI is making that calculus obsolete. Team size and corporate revenue were already weak proxies for delivery confidence. They no longer track the actual capacity to deliver.
What we deliver
At Coa, AI is how we operate, not an add-on:
- Our engineers run coding agents across multiple terminals for hours at a time, producing higher-quality code at a pace that would have required a team three or four times the size two years ago
- I rebuilt a production federal case management platform serving fifty-plus users with ten terabytes of data in two weeks
- A single agent under our supervision built the foundation of our federal contracting intelligence platform in 22 hours of wall time, pulling, normalizing, and indexing four federal data sources into one searchable system
That capacity sits on top of past performance the team has already delivered:
- VA.gov authenticated experience. Benefits delivery applications Veterans use to access their care and benefits.
- VA NCA AI pilot. AI prototype for the National Cemetery Administration contact center, built working directly with VA’s Chief AI Officer office.
- IRS US Certs. PEGA modernization for IRS.gov digital submissions.
- Cura Labs. Translational healthcare AI, led by a board-certified pathologist serving as our Chief Medical AI Officer.
In practice: a working prototype in weeks, a production system in months, and a delivery team that produces more for less because we built the company around AI from day one.
A path forward
I’m not asking for the bar to be lowered. I’m asking for it to be recalibrated.
Evaluate for potential, not just history. When a company’s leadership has built the systems, written the ATOs, and led the teams, weight that. Distinguish a new company with no relevant experience from a new company whose team has been shipping federal software for years.
Demand higher output and expect lower cost. Higher cost no longer means better delivery. AI drives faster, higher-quality output from smaller teams with lower overhead. Evaluate accordingly.
Recognize that the disruptors haven’t been through the pipeline yet. The companies that deliver something genuinely different are not the ones who spent a decade conforming to a prime’s playbook.
Build competitive disruption into the contract lifecycle. Waiting three to five years for a recompete isn’t competition; it’s renewal. Carve out $2 to $5 million task orders during a large contract and let new companies build alongside the incumbent. If the result is better, integrate it. If it isn’t, the cost was small and the incumbent was kept honest.
The risk isn’t giving a new company a chance. The risk is another contract cycle where nothing changes.
To the SES leaders setting acquisition strategy, the political appointees shaping agency priorities, and the contracting officers writing the evaluations: give companies like ours a real shot. A right-sized opportunity to prove that different teams, with different approaches, deliver different results. The capability is there. The question is whether you’re willing to let it through.
Ari Perez is the CEO of Coa Solutions, an SBA-certified SDVOSB and 8(a) small business delivering federal digital services and healthcare AI. A West Point graduate and combat veteran, Ari has stayed focused on delivery across administrations, whether deployed overseas as an Army officer or building federal systems at Deloitte, Accenture Federal Services, and the Executive Office of the President.