By applying our business analysis techniques and creating, AI-powered tools, we helped Los Angeles County create a process to support grant funding efforts.

Location

  • Los Angeles, California, USA

Government grants fund a wide variety of projects and play an important role in the world of municipal operations, but they also involve a competitive, bureaucratic process. In California, Los Angeles County decided to use innovations in artificial intelligence (AI) to streamline its approach for researching and strategizing on grant submittals regarding funding for its projects, all while giving time back to employees. 

LA County previously relied on various systems, such as automated email alerts, to keep track of active grants and new opportunities. But this uneven approach presented challenges when dealing with complex bids. The organization explored a new system that prioritized getting the earliest possible jump on new grants and identifying opportunities relevant to specific departments, teams or individuals. 

“It's very important to understand that multiple people or even multiple teams are looking at the same grant opportunities,” explains Sedrick Bouknight, Vice President, IT Project Management, WSP. “So, when creating a new system, LA County needed to capture the big picture of where it is in terms of grants that have been posted for funding, to essentially make sure that everyone’s on the same page about the status of every grant.”

We were already collaborating across various departments at LA County when John Helminski, Senior Vice President for Water Resources Engineering, WSP, noticed their struggles with the grant process. We work closely with LA County on core services—traditional engineering work—so we already understood how important grants are for delivering on their promises to their community. Our multidiscipline capability meant that John was able to tap into the wider WSP network to find the right experts for this challenge, leading him to Randy Ivory, Senior Vice President, IT Project Management, WSP. His team could offer a fresh perspective on the challenge with their expertise in digital and related innovation delivery fields.

That team went in with an open mind, using our established approach to business analysis to evaluate what the client really needed. Following focused discovery calls, we developed a scope of work that included workshops to help capture the client’s goals. We worked with the County to build on our understanding of the grant process and the rapidly evolving landscape of government grants.

“In situations like this, we work to understand our client’s business process and what tools are going to address their needs. We’re trying to find solutions for the clients’ problems, not the other way around. After those initial workshops, we decided that a new AI foundational framework would be ideal for helping the County manage, track and report on public grants,” explains Randy Ivory. “Our goal was to figure out an elegant way to help guide the entire grant application process.”

In 2023, the project officially commenced, aiming for a solution that uses AI to make it easier for the client to search, manage and submit grant applications.

After an iterative delivery process, the outcome was LA County GovGrant Copilot, an enterprise web application that integrates AI with comprehensive data visualization and collaboration tools. By automating repetitive tasks, surfacing actionable insights, and making it possible to automate processes that were previously too involved and drawn out to even consider, LA County aimed to increase its chances of success when pursuing grants and gave users more time to focus on high-value activities.  

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An AI platform open to all

Our business analysis concluded that the GovGrant solution needed to be suitable for everyone from executives to technical staff. The system is designed with a user-friendly interface to make it accessible to everyone working at the County, regardless of their level of technical expertise. The intention of this was to allow the application to be utilized across the department and increase the likelihood of widespread adoption. Users benefit from a personalized monitoring agent, which crafts a detailed user profile that allows the system to conduct overnight analysis while providing proactive insights, recommendations, deadline reminders and similar crucial information.

GovGrant leverages this, alongside personalized data summaries, to encourage users to stay engaged. It also incorporates a notification system, where alerts and updates help them keep current with grants in pursuit and new opportunities. Our team incorporated these features based on our business analysis, with the aim of advancing the important grant pursuit process and ultimately increase funding for county projects.

The application’s crowning achievement is how it aids collaboration, allowing cross-organization teams to securely share resources, manage tasks and find alignment with the help of a full suite of AI features. The database application allows the county to maintain a centralized grant-related data repository. Here, relevant information can be easily accessed and kept up to date, leading to better data management and potentially reducing errors or omissions. This function can also support data integrity and consistency, which are crucial for accurate reporting and compliance.

“Anything that you would typically do in the individual websites, those are aggregated,” explains Bouknight. “You can adjust your parameters as needed and any searches are a result of those aggregations from across all of the different data source providers. Those data sources get refreshed every night, so if a grant has been updated, those updates get pulled into the system and there's historical tracking of the individual entry. If there's something new, it gets pulled into the system.”

current and historical grants searchable through AI
100,000+
languages supported to improve accessibility
12+
centralized grant data repository
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Smarter, faster searches

The application augments the entire search process with AI, as natural language processing allows users to interact with the system and receive contextually relevant results with regular, jargon-free language. 

Similarly, the GovGrant solution also incorporates an AI grant bot, a conversational agent that uses semantic search and RAG features to draw from approximately 100,000 current and historical grants to find relevant information, making the search process both intuitive and efficient. 

With these features, AI is now embedded in the search process, drawing from historical data and current trends to generate recommendations that help the County identify suitable grants, understand eligibility requirements, and develop competitive applications, all of which can lead to more success when pursuing grants.

The AI capabilities go beyond searches: the grant authoring AI editor can help users refine their submissions and other supporting text materials, like subject-focused grant newsletters. The platform supports over a dozen languages and incorporated Power BI Dashboards provide interactive visualizations, trend analyses and data insights to contribute to informed decision-making. These features give the client even more tools for identifying relevant grants and then effectively following up and landing them.

More grants mean more projects and services

GovGrant is leading to an increased success rate in securing grants, which has contributed to a return of the client’s original investment, and they continue to experience ongoing reduced costs compared to their previous grant application workflows. By significantly reducing manual workloads with this new, easy-to-use solution, the system’s automated search and filtering capabilities empower users to spend their time on more important tasks, like strategic planning and project implementation. Automating these intensive processes can lead to savings, with reduced labor, fewer errors, and faster processing times.

I will say during our first real unveiling of this system, the client was completely blown away. They were really impressed with the solution that Sedrick had led and the level of innovation and grasp of AI shown in the delivery. Its capabilities went beyond their expectations.

In response to this enthusiasm, we continued our work through a series of meetings and milestone deliverables until GovGrant was a business-ready solution that was turned over to the client.

The application was also designed with the future in mind, as our team’s analysis guided them to add AI capabilities that can allow GovGrant to scale and adapt to the evolving business needs of the county. When new grant opportunities arise and requirements change, LA County will update the system to provide users with access to the most current and relevant information. 

Our collaboration with LA County on GovGrant shows how our digital expertise can modernize ways of working for the betterment of everyone. In this case, it allows the client to spend less time to secure more funding, freeing up employees to work on more valuable tasks, namely the projects supported by these grants. These benefits will help LA County become better equipped to improve the communities under its care, in both the present and the future.

While the solution was crafted to meet LA County’s needs, that usefulness doesn’t end at its boundaries. 

In addition to that cloud versatility, the GovGrant solution is applicable to public domains nationwide, in areas like United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) constructions, transit, rail and other infrastructure projects. 

There are many opportunities for future applications and GovGrant’s success has generated enthusiasm from the client as well as the grants management team within WSP, representing what may be the next launch point for a better, more AI-powered way of handling grants and advancing business objectives. It demonstrates how we combine creativity, industry expertise, business analysis methodology and digital capabilities to develop solutions that fit our clients’ needs and deliver ongoing value.

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