The City of Tucson is seeking proposals from qualified vendors to deliver an AI-powered service automation solution that reduces the burden of high-volume, routine interactions on city staff while improving the speed and quality of service for residents and internal users alike.
The City's goal is to establish a single, enterprise-grade platform capable of handling interactions across multiple channels, completing transactions on behalf of users, integrating with existing city systems, and expanding to serve additional departments over time.
Vendors are encouraged to propose solutions that reflect the full scope of what modern service automation can deliver, not simply what has been done before.
Background
The City of Tucson serves a population of approximately 750,000 residents and employs over 5,000 staff across multiple departments. City support teams currently manage a high volume of routine interactions through manual processes and legacy contact channels. These interactions consume significant staff capacity that could otherwise be directed toward higher-value work.
The City is pursuing this procurement as an opportunity to modernize how it delivers service, both internally and to the public, through a platform built for scale and long-term expansion.
NATIONAL CONTRACT REQUIREMENTS
Axia Coop LLC (“Axia Cooperative” or “Axia”) is a national public sector cooperative purchasing organization. Axia works with respected leaders from the public procurement community to offer a growing portfolio of master agreements that leverage national volume to deliver savings, efficiency, and innovation for non-federal public sector agencies. Each agreement is publicly solicited by a lead agency utilizing the strictest of procurement standards. The resulting awards address the dynamic needs of today’s evolving market while providing both value and cutting-edge solutions. For more information about the contracting process, please visit axiacoop.org/contracting-process.
The City of Tucson has entered into an agreement with Axia Cooperative to facilitate the Request For Proposals (RFP) and act as the primary contracting authority for the term of the resulting contract(s). Resulting contract(s) is/are made available to other public agencies nationally for “piggybacking” through the Axia Cooperative purchasing program and authorized by various joint powers authority statutes, rules and regulations within each state and local jurisdiction.
While Axia Cooperative makes no guarantees as to exact quantities and/or purchase volume made by Participating Agencies, the estimated annual volume for purchases made nationwide through this contract category is $25,000,000. Please see Attachment C for more information regarding the Axia Cooperative purchasing program.
Project Details
- Reference ID: 260218
- Department: Water Department
- Department Head: John Kmiec (Director)
Important Dates
- Questions Due: 2026-06-23T19:00:00.000Z
- Pre-Proposal Meeting: 2026-06-22T23:00:00.000Z — Microsoft Teams meeting
Evaluation Criteria
- Method of Approach (40 pts) —
- Provide a detailed description of your overall approach to delivering the proposed solution, including how the solution aligns with the City’s phased implementation strategy.
- Describe how the proposed platform will integrate with existing City systems, including but not limited to, Ivanti, DUO multi-factor authentication (MFA), etc.
- Explain how the solution will automate high-volume, routine interactions while maintaining accuracy and reliability.
- Describe the approach to intelligent routing, escalation, and seamless handoff to live agents.
- Provide a detailed implementation plan, including both a comprehensive timeline and a task-level schedule with proposed milestone payments.
- Explain the approach to system configuration, testing, validation, and user acceptance testing (UAT).
- Describe the approach to change management and user adoption.
- Explain how the solution will scale to support additional departments and public-facing services.
- Identify and provide details on potential risks and describe your mitigation strategies.
- Describe the approach to customer identification and authentication, including integration with identity management systems and handling of edge cases where verification cannot be completed.
- Describe the platform's approach to multilingual support, including how non-English interactions are handled across both chat and voice channels.
- Describe the approach to voice and IVR channel delivery, including how voice interactions are managed, transcribed, and escalated when needed.
- Describe the proposed project governance structure, including executive sponsorship, project management approach, escalation procedures, and communication protocols.
- Describe the approach to onboarding, configuring, and deploying each implementation phase, including discovery, design, testing, training, launch, and stabilization.
- Describe the approach to data migration, continuity planning, rollback procedures, and maintaining service operations during implementation or system transitions.
- Describe a prior implementation that did not meet initial performance expectations and explain the steps taken to identify root cause and remediate the issue.
- Describe the platform’s knowledge base architecture, including content ingestion, version control, approval workflows, multilingual content support, and administrator editing capabilities.
- Provide details on how the platform identifies low-confidence responses, prevents hallucinations, detects bias, and determines when escalation to a human agent is required.
- Describe administrative controls available to the City, including role-based permissions, audit logging, workflow approvals, and independent configuration management without vendor operational dependence.
- Describe reporting dashboards, analytics tools, and administrator visibility into platform performance, AI outputs, operational trends, and improvement opportunities.
- Provide details on your methodology for continuous improvement, including business reviews, optimization recommendations, root-cause analysis, and corrective action planning.
- Describe accessibility compliance methodology, including ADA, Section 508, WCAG 2.1 AA, testing protocols, and accessibility maintenance processes.
- Describe business continuity, disaster recovery, redundancy, and platform resiliency capabilities.
- Provide details on outbound campaign automation capabilities, monitoring controls, script management, and failure notification processes.
- Describe your approach to ensuring data privacy, confidentiality, and protection of personally identifiable information (PII), including encryption in transit and at rest, access controls, vulnerability management, and incident response procedures.
- Describe your approach to payment transaction security, including PCI DSS compliance where applicable and how cardholder data is protected.
- Describe all third-party AI model providers, subcontractors, hosted services, and APIs that will process City data, including each party’s role, data handling responsibilities, and security obligations.
- Describe your backup and Disaster Recovery Plan as well as Restoration Testing.
- Provide details on AI transparency and explainability, including how responses are generated, how confidence thresholds are established, and how administrators can review, override, correct, or suppress generated outputs.
- Provide details for preventing hallucinations, misinformation, inappropriate outputs, and discriminatory or biased responses in a government service environment.
- Describe your approach to monitoring platform accuracy over time, identifying performance degradation, and implementing remediation.
- Describe incident notification procedures, including timelines for notifying the City of cybersecurity events, service disruptions, or material platform changes affecting functionality, security, or data handling.
- Describe disaster recovery, backup, redundancy, and business continuity capabilities, including recovery objectives for critical public-facing services.
- Describe data ownership, retention, deletion, portability, and export capabilities upon contract termination or City request.
- Describe audit logging capabilities, administrative activity tracking, and controls available for City oversight and compliance monitoring.
- Describe your approach to isolating department-specific data environments and preventing cross-contamination of data, workflows, or AI training contexts between City departments.
- Provide your strategic product roadmap for the next 12 to 24 months.
- Include planned platform enhancements, emerging capabilities, anticipated integrations, security and accessibility advancements, reporting improvements, and AI functionality relevant to the City's intended use cases.
- For each roadmap item, indicate whether it is contractually committed or aspirational, and describe how the City will be notified if a committed item is delayed, descoped, or deprioritized.
- Explain how the proposed roadmap aligns with the City's phased vision for enterprise-wide service automation, as described in Section 3.1.D.
- Describe your approach to product governance, including how customer feedback, market trends, regulatory requirements (including ADA/WCAG 2.1 AA, FedRAMP/StateRAMP, and NIST AI RMF), and technological advancements influence roadmap development and release planning.
- Explain how significant product changes, enhancements, or deprecations are communicated to clients, including lead time, notification method, and transition support provided.
- Detail any value-added services and programs that may complement the comprehensive solutions and services offering. Such offerings may include (but are not necessarily limited to):
- Small business partnership programs, such as local fulfillment and/or service partners
- Training & Education
- Consulting services
- Green / Sustainable programs, such as recycling programs, company policies, product certifications, staff and/or company certifications, sustainable distribution practices, etc.
- Complete and sign the Federal Funds Certification included in Attachment C, Exhibit C.
- Review the Sample Axia Cooperative Administration Agreement in Attachment C, Exhibit D. Note any questions, concerns and/or proposed exceptions.
- Price Proposal (35 pts) —
- Provide price proposal as requested on the Price Page attached herein.
- Proposed price must be inclusive of all costs, including but not limited to, direct and indirect costs for labor, overhead, materials, printing, travel and mileage, postage, etc.
- Provide a breakdown of costs by phase, including Phase 1 (IT Service Desk), Phase 2 (Tucson Water), and Phase 3 (citywide expansion), so the City can evaluate phased investment independently.
- Identify all costs that are consumption-based, usage-based, or variable, including per-interaction, per-user, or per-channel pricing, and provide assumptions used to calculate proposed totals.
- Describe any costs not included in the base proposal that the City may incur, including implementation, training, integration development, ongoing support tiers, and platform upgrades.
- Provide a comprehensive Not-To-Exceed (NTE) pricing / discount structure for participating agencies of the Axia Cooperative purchasing program. This may be a list of products and/or categories with corresponding minimum discounts, individual products with NTE unit prices, minimum hourly service rates, etc. This may include products/solutions and services that the City of Tucson itself may not specifically call out in the Scope of Work.
- Describe your pricing methodology. Do you utilize a discount off of list model, “web” pricing minus discount model, etc.?
- Describe how and how often the pricing documents are updated. Detail items and/or categories that may be updated more often than others.
- Detail how market conditions impact pricing and propose how you plan to account for such changes. Can pricing adjustments be audited and tracked with an index or other calculation?
- Describe any regional and/or individual custom pricing lists that may be available to participating agencies of the Axia Cooperative purchasing program. Detail how this kind of program can be extended to one or more participating public agencies, the number of items that can be made available through such a program, how and how often the list is updated, limitations based on the type and size of the participating agency, etc.
- Describe if and how volume discounts may be applied for certain orders.
- Qualifications & Experience (25 pts) —
- Provide a detailed overview of your company, including years in business, corporate headquarters location, number of employees and types of business.
- Provide details on your firm’s experience delivering similar solutions for public sector organizations.
- Demonstrate your company’s ability to meet the evolving needs of public sector customers of varying sizes and locations.
- Describe experience implementing artificial intelligence-driven service automation platforms for Information Technology (IT) service desks.
- Provide examples of projects involving customer service or utility billing environments similar to Tucson Water.
- Describe experience integrating with systems such as, but not limited to, Ivanti and multi-factor authentication systems.
- Identify key personnel assigned to the project and describe their qualifications and relevant experience.
- Provide at least three references for similar projects, including project scope, outcomes, and performance metrics.
- Provide measurable results from prior implementations, including automation rates, reduction in call volume, and customer satisfaction improvements.
- Identify any subcontractors or third-party partners involved in solution delivery and describe their qualifications and role in the engagement.
- Describe prior experience delivering phased enterprise implementations that expanded from internal operational use cases to public-facing constituent services.
- Provide examples of prior deployments involving voice automation, IVR, telephony integrations, or omnichannel service delivery.
- Describe prior experience supporting regulated environments involving PCI DSS, PII protection, or comparable public-sector security requirements.
- Provide documented operational benchmarks from comparable deployments, including self-service resolution rate, escalation rate, accuracy rate, customer satisfaction, and adoption metrics.
- Describe experience implementing multilingual customer service platforms, including Spanish-language support.
- Describe prior experience meeting ADA / WCAG accessibility requirements for public-facing digital services.
- Describe prior experience supporting customer success, optimization consulting, and long-term platform growth after implementation.
- Describe your product roadmap execution over the past 24 months.
- Include major enhancements, integrations, AI advancements, accessibility and security improvements, and measurable outcomes delivered to customers.
- Additionally, describe one planned roadmap item that was delayed, cancelled, or significantly changed. Explain the reason, how impacted clients were notified, and what support was provided.
- Describe any mergers, acquisitions, ownership changes, or organizational restructuring that have occurred in the past 36 months or are currently anticipated.
- Explain how these changes have affected or may affect platform development, client support, and contractual obligations.
- Describe your organizational investment in long-term platform development, including R&D initiatives, strategic technology partnerships, and innovation programs that directly support the capabilities proposed in this response.
- Identify any third-party technologies, platforms, or vendors that are material dependencies of your proposed solution.
- Describe the risk mitigation measures in place if those dependencies are discontinued, acquired, or significantly changed.
- How many sellers are dedicated to selling to and supporting the state & local government and education (SLED) market?
- Detail your national product distribution and service delivery/support network.
Demonstrate your commitment to leverage the Axia Cooperative purchasing program to make the resulting contract available to public agencies across the country. Include details about your firm’s ability to:
Market the agreement to public agencies nationally
Educate your firm’s sales staff about the cooperative purchasing program
Connect your sellers with the Axia team to pursue joint selling efforts
Connect with customer decision makers
Track sales and report back to Axia Cooperative
- What specific steps will your company take to train and equip their account managers to sell the cooperative contract / program on a national basis?
- Will you establish national sales goals for public agency adoption of the cooperative agreement?
- What tools will you utilize to track opportunities and hold sellers accountable?
- Who are your national/corporate points of contact for sales, marketing, contract administration and monthly sales reporting for the cooperative program?
- Describe all methods of accepting orders (online, apps, phone, email, in-person, etc.).
- Describe your available invoicing processes.
- Describe your customer issue resolution process. Also detail customer service escalation procedures.
- Detail the scope of related products/solutions and services that your company offers.
- Describe performance measures for areas for customer success.
- If your business intends to conduct business in the State of New Jersey, download, complete and sign the forms found in the “Vendor Forms Required For All Proposal Submissions” at https://www.nj.gov/treasury/purchase/forms.shtml#eo134.
Submission Requirements
- Discounts —
As stated in the Instructions to Offerors. Discounts, the price(s) herein can be discounted by _______%, if payment is made within ______ days. These payment terms shall apply to all purchases and to all payment methods.
- Cooperative Purchasing Program —
Cooperative Purchasing allows other public agencies to piggyback on the City of Tucson’s contracts. Will your firm provide Axia Cooperative, as the administrator of this national cooperative contract, an administrative fee in the form of a percentage of sales?
- Does your firm have a City of Tucson Business License?
- Please upload a copy of your business license.
- Forms to be Filled Out —
Please ensure that all required information is included with your response.
Response to Evaluation Criteria
Pricing Proposal
Offer and Acceptance Form
- Response to Evaluation Criteria (required) —
Please upload your response to the Evaluation Criteria.
- Pricing Proposal —
Please upload your Pricing Proposal (if applicable).
- Offer and Acceptance Form (required) —
Please upload your signed Offer and Acceptance form.
- Does your response to this solicitation include a request to keep any portion confidential and withhold it from the public record? (required) —
Please note: The City of Tucson is a public agency subject to public records laws. Therefore, all requests to withhold information from the public record must be accompanied by justification. Pricing will not be held confidential.
- Confidential Information (required) —
If you answered yes, then you must use this field to identify the sections of your submittal that you are requesting be withheld from public record.
If sections are not identified as confidential in this field, your request to hold information confidential may not be accepted.
Please note: The City of Tucson is a public agency subject to public records laws. Therefore, all requests to withhold information from the public record must be accompanied by justification. Pricing will not be held confidential.
- Is your firm submitting any exceptions for the City's consideration? (required) —
In accordance with Instructions to Offerors - Exceptions to Contract Provisions, any exceptions that an offeror wishes to submit for the City's consideration must be indicated here in order to be considered.
- Define the exceptions you are requesting. (required)
- Living Wage (required) —
Will Living Wage Requirements be a part of the resulting contract?
- Will the resultant contract have Federal Funding? (required)
- Special Terms and Conditions (required) —
Please select the required language that should be included under Special Terms and Conditions for this project. Please select all that apply.
- Insurance Requirements (required) —
Please select the additional insurance coverages required for this project. Please select all that apply.
- Initial Term of Contract (required) —
What is the initial term of the contract?
Please use the following format: one (1)
Even if you selected auto renewal, you need to add the initial term, i.e. one (1)
- Renewal Options (required) —
Will renewal options be given with this contract?
If you selected Auto Renewal, select No.
- Renewal Term (required) —
What is the renewal term of the contract?
Please use the following format: four (4)
If no extension options will be given or you selected automatic renewals, please enter "N/A".
- Pricing (required) —
Will you build the pricing table in OpenGov Procurement?
- Separate Pricing Document (required) —
If you will be requesting the pricing to be provided by the vendor outside of the OpenGov system, have you attached the required document to this solicitation?
- Attachments (required) —
Do you have any attachments?