Governed AI for the organizations that run on Washington

Greater Washington is not one economy but three that feed each other. There is the federal government itself, the Pentagon in Arlington and the agencies across the District. There is the contractor and consulting base built to serve it, with Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, Leidos, SAIC and Booz Allen Hamilton headquartered in the region. And there is a commercial economy that is easy to overlook: Capital One and Freddie Mac in McLean, Marriott International in Bethesda, the health systems, law firms, trade associations and think tanks along K Street.

All three have the same problem with AI. The work is text-heavy and rule-bound, so the upside is large, but every output has to be explainable to someone: a contracting officer, an examiner, an inspector general, a board. I design, build and optimize agentic workflows, retrieval systems and private AI infrastructure with that accountability built in, and I measure each one against a KPI the organization already reports on. That habit comes from 15-plus years in marketing and data analytics and more than $50M in managed ad spend, where every dollar had to show its return.

Washington's AI ecosystem is shaped by policy and infrastructure as much as by startups. NIST, headquartered in Gaithersburg in the Maryland suburbs, publishes the AI Risk Management Framework, released in January 2023, and a Generative AI Profile published in July 2024; both have become common reference points for how organizations document AI risk. Loudoun County in Northern Virginia describes itself as a global leader in the data center industry, which makes the region one of the natural homes for the private and hybrid AI infrastructure that regulated buyers increasingly want. Around those sit the telecom and technology firms of the Dulles Technology Corridor, a consortium of universities across the metro, and the NIH research campus in Bethesda. The talent and the compute are here. What organizations usually lack is a clear path from policy memo to a working system with a measured result.

I am based in Minnesota and work remote-first with organizations across the District, Northern Virginia and suburban Maryland. Each engagement has a fixed scope and price, a KPI set on day one and a working demo every week, with documentation written as we go so security, legal and governance reviewers are never handed a black box at the end. I come on-site when it helps: the kickoff workshop where we map the workflow and choose the metric, sessions with security or compliance leadership, and launch. I do not hold government contracts, security clearances or FedRAMP authorizations, so I scope work to environments and data where those are not required, or support your team and prime contractors on the commercial and internal side of the house.