Why We're in the Room at Prodacity 2026

Almost every frustration in the benefits system eventually traces back to software. A claim that takes months longer than it should. A form that asks for information the government already holds. Three systems that cannot see each other, so you become the integration layer between them, carrying the same document to each office.

Those are not policy failures. They are delivery failures, and they get fixed, or not fixed, by the people who decide how government software gets built, procured, and shipped. Prodacity is a room full of those people.

The conference is run by Rise8 and centers on continuous delivery inside government: getting working software into users' hands faster, and getting past the procurement and approval machinery that makes that hard. This year's program leans heavily into what AI changes about that work.

The three days are structured around finding where delivery actually stalls, hearing from practitioners who have shipped in hard environments, and turning that into workable playbooks. It is a working conference more than a keynote conference, which is why it is useful.

MILCONNECT.AI exists because the information a service member or veteran needs is scattered across dozens of systems that were never designed to talk to each other. We built calculators, checklists, and plain-English guides to close that gap from the outside.

But the gap itself is created upstream. Understanding how these systems get built, what the constraints genuinely are, and where modernization is actually heading tells us where the gap will move next. We would rather build for where the system is going than for where it was.

There is a lot of talk right now about AI in government services, and a fair share of it is noise. What we are listening for is the specific version: where AI genuinely reduces the time between a veteran needing something and getting it, and where it just adds a chat window on top of the same broken process.

Our own position on this has not changed. AI is useful for helping someone understand a complicated system quickly. It is not a substitute for an accredited representative on a real claim, and we are not going to pretend otherwise because the technology is fashionable.

• Faster claim and record processing behind the scenes
• Systems that share data instead of asking you to carry it
• Plain-language explanation of complex eligibility rules
• Not: a chatbot layered over a process that still does not work

Nothing changes on the site this week. The tools are free, the guides stay free, and we still do not collect or sell your data. That is not a conference-driven decision.

What you may notice over the next few months is us building toward the parts of the system that are actually moving. We will write up what we learned once the conference wraps, including the parts that were less impressive than the marketing.