Meet the three finalists of the 2026 Innovation Challenge, where bold ideas and emerging technologies are transforming government operations. Selected by AGA’s TTS Technology Committee from submissions reviewed by industry experts, these finalists showcase practical, scalable innovations that address complex public-sector challenges. Each finalist will present their solution live at TTS ’26, where attendees will help choose the winning innovation. Explore their ideas below and see how they could shape the future of government services.

Innovation Name: Audit Acceleration & Control Monitoring Solution

Submitted By: Sairah Ijaz – Celonis

Summary

Audit and continuous control monitoring through process intelligence and transaction-based testing. The solution consists of a set of assets needed to form a holistic user experience for internal control and audit departments. Taking it from the famous “Three Lines of Defense” Model relevant for risk and compliance functions within a company, the solution mainly targets the second line of defense, providing the relevant tooling to measure and monitor control violations across a variety of predefined risk segments within Accounts Payable (the solution can easily be transitioned to any other process).

Innovation Name: Market Research As a Service (MRAS)

Submitted By: Kristy Wilbur – GSA

Summary

Integrated suite of automations to streamline procurement for faster, compliant federal acquisition. Our innovation is a comprehensive Market Research As a Service (MRAS) Digital Ecosystem, integrating the MRAS Market Research Tool (MRT), General Services Administration’s (GSA) Scope Review Tool (SRT) and a suite of robotic process automations (RPA) to better serve GSA’s customer base across all federal, state, local, and tribal sectors. MRAS transforms a historically manual, email-intensive market research workflow into a fully automated, data-driven capability that ensures compliance with FAR Part 10 and is formally recognized as a resource within FAR 2.0.

Innovation Name: Humanless Unmatched Transactions (HUNT)

Submitted By: Conner Lawston – cBEYONData

Summary

HUNT is an AI system that rapidly identifies and fixes errors in DoD financial transactions. It analyzes thousands of daily transactions—such as Marine Corps purchase orders—detecting issues like incorrect PO numbers or missing data. Using custom-trained AI models and business rules, HUNT fills in 50+ missing fields per transaction and recommends corrections. With human oversight, it can resubmit repaired transactions for processing. As one of the DoD’s first intelligent automations on Databricks, HUNT has been in production for five years, processing over 600,000 transactions with about 90% accuracy.