Powers AI-driven intelligence
With Elasticsearch, combined with RAG and LLM tools, GovTribe has developed a chatbot, called AI Insights, which enables users to produce key market insights from a vast amount of government procurement data.
Improves discovery
With Elasticsearch, GovTribe provides cutting edge semantic and keyword search across federal and state and local procurement data, making sure customers never miss an opportunity.
Saves money and simplifies infrastructure
GovTribe used Elasticsearch to replace a standalone vector database, reducing costs and streamlining its infrastructure.
Combining Elasticsearch, with RAG, and generative AI delivers smarter insights and automates complex workflows for government contractors.
From purchase orders worth less than $100 to billion-dollar contracts, GovTribe helps businesses compete for and win government work across federal, state, and local jurisdictions. Founded in 2012, the company celebrated a decade of innovation when it was acquired by GovExec, the leading information services company for government leaders and contractors, in 2021.
GovTribe subscribers can explore thousands of contract opportunities and uncover vital market intelligence. In addition, built-in CRM tools make it easy to manage pursuits, track team activity, and collaborate efficiently through a central dashboard.
Turning raw government data into insights
Elasticsearch, running on Elastic Cloud and AWS, plays a critical role at the heart of GovTribe's architecture. It powers everything from large-scale data ingestion and search to the company's pioneering retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) implementation and generative AI tools.
This involves tens of millions of records of structured and unstructured data from a wide variety of sources including federal government procurement systems, state and local government portals and agency-specific contract databases. This raw data is then consolidated and refined into structured records, stored in a database, and mirrored in Elasticsearch to support fast, streamlined querying.
"Our data pipelines are efficient, our database operates quickly, and the process of making data discoverable in Elastic is also rapid," says Nate Nash, Executive Vice President at GovExec and co-founder of GovTribe. Elasticsearch also handles the daily surges in data that arrive each morning, which is essential for customers who need to stay up to date with government releases.
Elastic is also the foundation of GovTribe's alerting system. Timely notifications are critical to GovTribe customers, and fast data ingestion ensures the company can deliver alerts as soon as new information becomes available.
"Switching to Elastic Cloud was a huge time and cost saving for us."
The core Elasticsearch experience combines full-text queries with filters based on structured metadata. For example, searching by keyword and filtering by issuing agency. Users can also save their search criteria and GovTribe automatically runs these saved queries in the background and sends alerts when new matches are found. Analytics is another key feature, with GovTribe using Elasticsearch aggregations to generate charts, graphs, and other visual summaries across different data points.
Pioneering AI Insights with Elastic
GovTribe is now leading the way in applying semantic search and generative AI to the procurement space, again with Elasticsearch at the core. This includes “AI Insights,” the company's native chatbot, as well as robust semantic search capabilities across the data.
Users can now initiate searches using natural language, rather than relying on exact government terminology. Responses, generated by industry-leading LLMs, are accurate, reader-friendly and direct customers to the next stage on their procurement journey. For businesses used to the commercial sector, this capability bridges the gap between familiar industry language and the specialized terms often used in government procurement.
AI Insights also excels at pattern recognition and high-level synthesis. For example, instead of simply listing awarded contracts, it can analyze the competitive landscape, flag recent wins, identify top-performing vendors, and more. GovTribe also provides pre-built prompts to guide users through these types of queries.
GovTribe chose the Elastic vector database to power next-generation AI features based on three key factors. Its robust vector storage, its support for advanced AI use cases, and the ability to consolidate infrastructure and save money by removing the need for a separate vector database.
"The integration of AI-backed capabilities is no longer optional. It's a fundamental requirement for remaining competitive and offering effective, timely solutions to our customers. Elasticsearch — and its vector database — plays a critical role in this delivery."
Accelerating customer success with AI and Elastic
Elasticsearch is also the technology behind a new generation of timesaving, AI-powered features for GovTribe customers. These include automatically generating draft proposals or specific components like compliance matrices, work that previously required hours of manual effort.
Another example is the ability to identify likely bidders for a given RFP. Users can quickly receive a report outlining key players, their past performance, and relevant insights, saving analysts considerable research time.
These features combine RAG, sophisticated prompting, and Elasticsearch as the underlying vector database. In the "likely bidders" scenario, the LLM is prompted to query Elasticsearch to identify companies with a history of relevant awards.
Looking ahead, GovTribe is eager to adopt further AI innovations from Elastic. "Elastic underpins all our applications requiring embeddings and vector search," says Nash. "As we continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible for government contract customers, we expect to take further advantage of Elastic’s cutting-edge AI search and database features."
