Sole Source Justification Summary

This is a Sole Source Justification (SSJ) document for a new firm-fixed-price FSS order under the Multiple Award Schedule contract 47QTCA26D003S, Special Item Number 518210C (NAICS 518210) with Kaizen Laboratories Inc.

Requirement and Background: The U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) requires an AI-native complaint intake and case analysis solution to address a critical backlog exceeding 40,000 cases growing at approximately 2,000 complaints monthly. OCR began 2025 with 19,000 pending complaints and received a record 23,879 new complaints during 2025, while resolving only one percent of pending inventory. The requirement mandates in-boundary deployment within the Department's existing cloud security perimeter, full production capability within 90 calendar days of award, and a 30-day transition-out option exercisable at Government discretion. The solution must comprise pre-built, production-proven platform modules existing and named as commercial products at quote submission, with AI-native classification and analysis embedded in the core data pipeline meeting 90 percent precision and 85 percent recall standards, and supporting human-in-the-loop review with Government-adjustable confidence-based escalation. Compliance with FISMA Moderate baseline, Section 508, FERPA, and the Privacy Act of 1974 is required.

Sole Source Justification: The document concludes that Kaizen Laboratories Inc. is the only source capable of meeting the requirement combination within the required timeframe based on market research from GSA eBuy RFI1822661 and detailed capability analysis. The controlling constraint is the combination of: in-boundary deployment using existing Federal authorization, 90-day production deployment, production-proven modules assembled rather than custom-developed, AI-native classification with specified performance metrics, and AI-assisted requirements-to-configuration capability. No other FSS contractor or combination of contractors satisfies this combination per market research findings documented in Section 6. The Government will conduct future market surveillance and continue seeking competitive solutions for subsequent orders.