Charles Lyons-Burt 
- About 400,000 hours identified as of April
- EOA playbook now open to every agency
- Automation takes center stage at Oct. 29 FedCiv Summit
The General Services Administration has put a number on its efficiency ambitions, and it’s a big one. Through its Million Hour Challenge, the agency aims to shift one million hours of employee and contractor workload from manual, low-value tasks to higher-value work during fiscal years 2026 and 2027, handing repetitive workflows to artificial intelligence and intelligent automation. That’s roughly the annual output of nearly 500 full-time employees.
The effort has also outgrown GSA’s own walls. The agency has codified its approach in a governmentwide playbook, a strong signal to federal civilian agencies, and the contractors who support them, about where automation dollars and priorities are headed.
GovCons looking to get ahead of that shift can hear directly from GSA and a full-day slate packed with federal civilian technology leaders at the Potomac Officers Club’s 2026 FedCiv Summit on Oct. 29. Register now to secure your spot and engage with GSA decision-makers like Chief Acquisition Officer Greg Justice (keynote) and Chief Human Capital Officer Arron Helm (panelist), both pending confirmation.
What Is GSA’s Million Hour Challenge?
The Million Hour Challenge is GSA’s internal moonshot, built on the agency’s Eliminate, Optimize, Automate methodology, or EOA. The approach dates to 2019, when it launched in GSA’s Office of the Chief Financial Officer before spreading agency-wide.
The track record gives the new goal some ballast. GSA has deployed more than 190 automation applications since 2019, saving an estimated 2 million-plus hours of workload, according to the Federal EOA Playbook. Requirements reviews have eliminated more than 115,000 hours of annual workload, and process optimization saves another 125,000-plus hours each year.
The challenge’s main automation engine is USAi, GSA’s AI platform, though GSA Chief Information Officer David Shive has stressed the effort isn’t solely an AI play.
“[It’s using] all the tech in the toolbox, including eliminating tools and systems and processes that should no longer be around, optimizing existing processes or automating and augmenting stuff with AI and other things,” Shive said in an interview with Nextgov/FCW.
How Close Is GSA to Its Goal?
GSA Deputy Administrator Michael Lynch said in April that the agency had identified about 400,000 hours of the million-hour target, putting it almost halfway there, GovExec reported. He was careful to frame the work as redeployment rather than replacement.
“We have about 400,000 hours that are currently identified of ways that we can — not replace people — but remove that non-high-value added time and replace it by putting people on more high-value opportunities within the agency,” Lynch said an event. “And that really goes to address some of the workforce challenges we’ve had.”
Those challenges are steep. GSA has lost nearly 40% of its workforce since October 2024, including its 18F digital services unit, Federal News Network said.
To help close the gap, GSA stood up GSA Labs, a program that places high-performing early-to-mid-career employees into small, cross-functional teams with executive sponsorship. More than 300 employees applied, and an initial cohort of 30 is now tackling five problem statements aimed at building interoperable systems and processes. Lynch described the group as “almost our internal McKinsey consulting group.”
Workforce questions like these will get a full airing at the 2026 FedCiv Summit. GSA Chief Human Capital Officer Arron Helm (pending confirmation) is slated for the Human Capital at the Speed of Mission panel, where he’ll likely discuss how agencies can redeploy talent as automation absorbs routine work.
Why Does the EOA Playbook Matter Beyond GSA?
GSA published the EOA Playbook on June 3, with Lynch, Chief Financial Officer Nimisha Agarwal and Larry Allen, associate administrator of the Office of Governmentwide Policy, serving as executive sponsors. In his sponsor note, Lynch writes that the guide builds on lessons from the Million Hour Challenge.
The playbook breaks the method into three moves:
- Eliminate: Redefine or remove policies, procedures and requirements that create unnecessary work
- Optimize: Standardize and streamline work across business units to cut duplication
- Automate: Replace manual, rules-based tasks with scalable automation
Its most striking case study comes from GSA’s own finance office, which paired a 24-month hiring freeze with EOA to trim staffing from 450 to 343 full-time employees while engagement scores on the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey climbed from 66 percent to 88 percent. GSA also draws on earlier pilots at the Department of Education and NASA.
Shive said the playbook’s secondary purpose is organizational change management, historically the hardest part of modernization.
“Look, this doesn’t have to be a big, bad, scary thing; it does work,” he said of the message GSA wants agency partners to hear.
For contractors, the takeaway is practical: agencies adopting EOA will need partners who can help them identify workload to eliminate, map processes and deploy automation at scale. The 2026 FedCiv Summit‘s Digital Labor in the Workforce of Tomorrow panel goes straight at that opportunity, featuring Andrea Brandon, deputy assistant secretary for budget, finance, grants and acquisition at the Department of the Interior, and Gustav Chiarello, assistant secretary for financial resources at the Department of Health and Human Services, with Karim Fadel of CGI Federal moderating. Finance and grants workflows are exactly where EOA first proved itself, so the panelists may discuss where automation fits in those back-office operations.
Don’t miss your chance to hear from these leaders. Save your seat at the 2026 FedCiv Summit today.
How Is GSA Changing the Way Government Buys Tech?
The Million Hour Challenge sits inside a broader rewiring of federal technology adoption. Shive said the traditional sequence, in which academia builds a technology, standards bodies assess it, the White House issues guidance and agencies finally implement, could take two to three years. GSA now flips that order, running pilots and minimum viable products first and feeding real government use cases back to standards-setters.
OneGov is the procurement expression of that philosophy. The initiative has struck more than two dozen deals with technology companies and saved agencies more than $1 billion since its April 2025 launch, and GSA is mining USAi usage data to inform its next round of negotiations. Lynch said in April to expect a wave of announcements on how those deals mature within six to nine months, a window that lands right around the 2026 FedCiv Summit.
Shive is also bullish on what AI can do for service delivery.
“Right now, I say we’re 50 percent of the way there,” he said in June. “And by this time next year, I suspect we’ll be 90 percent of the way there.”
At the 2026 FedCiv Summit, GSA Chief Acquisition Officer Greg Justice (pending confirmation), who also serves as associate administrator of GSA’s Office of Small Business, will deliver a keynote address and may discuss how the agency’s acquisition overhaul affects the companies competing for federal technology work. The summit’s The OneGov Effect panel, featuring Chris Radich of UiPath, Wade Zarriello of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and James Donnellon of NOAA’s satellite and information service, NESDIS, will dig into how AI is accelerating agency modernization and migration.
Why Should GovCons Attend the FedCiv Summit?
GSA wrote the EOA playbook for agencies like the ones headlining the 2026 FedCiv Summit, making the event a front-row look at how automation will move from GSA’s pilot projects into the broader federal civilian enterprise. At the summit, attendees can:
- Hear from agency CIOs including Department of Labor CIO Mangala Kuppa and Department of Energy CIO Dawn Zimmer, who may discuss their modernization priorities
- Get the acquisition view from GSA’s Greg Justice (pending confirmation) and Small Business Administration Deputy Administrator William Briggs
- Explore the tools behind the shift through panels on observability, digital labor, AI-driven modernization and trusted information sharing, with voices from Celonis, UiPath, SAP and the Department of State
- Engage with decision-makers across civilian agencies during dedicated networking sessions
The 2026 FedCiv Summit takes place Oct. 29 at The Ritz-Carlton, Pentagon City, in Arlington, Virginia. Register today to join the conversation.
