USAi may no longer be free, but a General Services Administration official has a pitch for agencies on the fence about adoption: GSA will save you months in acquisition time and handle the “boring” stuff.
Launched in August 2025 as a no-cost tool for federal agencies to experiment with AI models, USAi pricing was introduced last month. Per the GSA’s website, agencies will now pay a “platform fee plus passthrough usage costs” for USAi.
Ryan Palmer, architecture lead for AI at GSA, didn’t directly address the new pay-for model during a Federal News Network webinar Tuesday, but he made the case for why the shared service is worth it for agencies.
USAi’s value starts with procurement, Palmer said, with GSA saving agencies from monthslong authority to operate processes and lengthy trials that can be rendered moot given the “rapidly advancing capabilities” of AI.
The next steps, historically, are a host of siloed pilots with “inconsistent implementation” and “a lot of government agencies solving the same problems over and over and over again in different ways,” Palmer said.
“So how we approach that in GSA is we build … USAi as a shared government platform and landing zone,” he continued. “We’re handling … most of the boring work, right?”
“Boring” in this case means GSA takes care of all the acquisition and testing issues so individual agency teams “can just rapidly turn the key and start using AI and exploring the technology,” he said.
That approach runs counter to previous governmentwide adoption efforts in cloud, which Palmer said was done in “spits and spurts” and ultimately took “decades.”
By shortening the acquisition lifecycle with AI tools, GSA aims to make sure agencies have the latest AI tools at their disposal with little delay. With agentic systems becoming increasingly common, time-consuming administrative tasks should be cut down substantially, Palmer said.
On the backend, Palmer said he’s working on reference architectures, standardizing telemetry, partnering with vendors and taking into account lessons learned to make sure agencies derive value from the platform.
Despite the new pricing model, Palmer said GSA is still focused on “passing on those OneGov savings” to customers. To make that happen, the agency is “doing a lot of transition” from several small pilots to broader, more “operational use” of the technology.
“There’s a lot moving here,” Palmer said, “and it’s great to see [that] a platform like USAi provided to agencies can help them implement and adopt this rapidly evolving technology in a responsible way quickly.”