He Ran City IT. Now He Builds the Software That Runs Cities. Our CEO Tom Amburgey recently joined Robin Ayoub on the Localization Fireside Chat — and it’s one of the more honest conversations in GovTech you’ll hear. Tom spent years as Chief Information Officer (CIO) inside two Florida municipalities before crossing to the vendor side, meaning he’s sat in the chair his customers sit in today. That experience shapes everything about how he leads Euna, a platform managing hundreds of billions in public funds across over 3,600 government organizations in the United States and Canada.
What makes Tom’s perspective rare is the credibility that comes with it. When he tells a government customer he understands their pressures, he means it in a way most vendors can’t.
“If you’ve not had to sit in front of an elected board and fight for a project, if you’ve not had to answer calls from constituents who are frustrated with some process… if you’ve never sat there, you really don’t understand. And so, I can sit across from the table and legitimately tell them, I understand.”
That grounding also shapes how Euna thinks about its reason for existing:
“We exist to build trust and enable transparency in all of our communities. Everything we do, we’re going to act a certain way, we’re going to tell the truth, and we’re going to build tools that enable our customers to be transparent.”
A big part of the episode digs into the challenges in government procurement. The numbers are sobering — agencies spend an average of 90 hours per RFP and get two to five bids back. Tom traces it to staff stretched thin across 10, 15, even 20 RFPs in a budget year, recycling templates without time to update them, and a supplier visibility gap that means the right vendors never even see the opportunity. The result is less competition, worse outcomes, and a procurement system that fails everyone involved. Tom has seen these challenges from the inside, which is part of what shaped our Solicitation Advisor, an AI tool that reviews draft RFPs before they go public, catching vague requirements and mismatched criteria before they drive vendors away.
Available now within Euna Procurement, Solicitation Advisor is trained primarily on publicly available government procurement data, which as Tom points out, is abundant precisely because government is required to be transparent. Early results from customers piloting the tool suggest a jump from two or three RFP responses to nine or twelve. The goal of Solicitation Advisor isn’t to replace the expertise of the procurement officer, but to give them the time and clarity to do the job well.
“We really think of AI as a tool, not a replacement. What we want is the quality of the budget, the depth of analysis, the ability to build out views you were never able to build before because you didn’t have the time. You get the time back because of AI.”
Catch the full conversation on YouTube or Simplecast.
