Pentagon procurement still runs on paper. In some cases, metal filing cabinets dating to the World War II era.
That's what Terzo CEO and Founder Brandon Card heard when he sat down with Ambassador and Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, USA (Ret.). Lute is a retired three-star general, former U.S. Ambassador to NATO, and Terzo's newest board member. They met to talk about financial accountability inside the federal government, and where contract intelligence fits in.
Lute joined Terzo's Board of Directors because he saw a direct application. The AI-driven financial intelligence Terzo built for Fortune 500 companies is what federal agencies now need to meet the accountability demands being placed on them.
Congress has already set the deadline: all Pentagon accounts must be auditable by 2028. The Department of Defense operates on a budget approaching $1 trillion. The Department of Veterans Affairs runs on roughly $450 billion a year. Every dollar of that spending flows through contracts, and most federal agencies have no real-time visibility into what those contracts obligate them to pay, bill, or recover.
Terzo reads every contract, invoice, and purchase order an organization holds and extracts the financial obligations buried inside them. For a federal agency, that means catching overpayments, recovering money already owed, and renegotiating from data rather than assumption. To date, Terzo has identified more than $1 billion in measurable financial impact for its customers.
