The Agile Edge
The future of defense tech depends on fundamental rejection of the status quo, especially when it comes to AI.
By Josh Knight, Integer Chief Operating Officer & Cofounder
In the defense technology sector, the new narrative revolves around the ongoing obsolescence of the traditional industry primes. Call them dinosaurs or the Titanic – they’re big, slow and a meteor or iceberg is incoming. As the story goes, these entrenched organizations often struggle to turn quickly, hampered by legacy systems and a culture of cautious, incremental change. But as the pace of global technological advancement accelerates, the distance between being a market leader and being obsolete is shrinking.
And while the reports of the death of the traditional primes (to paraphrase Mark Twain) are “greatly exaggerated,” there is a key lesson to learn in the rise of the neo-defense tech firms – move quickly, embrace change, or be left behind.
At Integer Technologies, we believe the key to navigating this shift lies in a fundamental rejection of the status quo. We have moved past the era of viewing Artificial Intelligence (AI) as an experimental add-on or a future-dated roadmap item. Instead, we are operating at the tip of the spear, implementing a dual-sided strategy that leverages AI to lift the entire organization, simultaneously transforming how we operate internally and what we deliver to the customer.
Our approach is built on a left-and-right brain organizational model. The right side focuses on operational excellence: the back-office support, marketing, business development, and strategy that keep the engine of the company running. The left side of our strategy focuses on product capabilities: AI-powered development, digital twin simulations, and real-time decision support systems.
By applying AI to both halves of the business, we avoid the silicon ceiling that plagues many organizations; where leadership talks about innovation, but employees are still bogged down by outdated administrative burdens.
Right Brain: AI as Operational Force Multiplier
A common fear is that AI is designed to replace people. At Integer, we view it as a tool to empower our back-office support, allowing our agile teams to provide top-level service to our engineers and researchers. For example, in the world of government contracting, a single agreement can span 60 pages of dense, critical requirements. Traditionally, reviewing these documents required a senior-level human to spend days identifying risks and compliance hurdles. This is where Vector, our internally developed AI-powered operations platform, comes into focus.
Rather than waiting for yet another commercial software product that only partially fit our needs, we took a different approach – using AI tools to create Vector, an integrated, real-time operational environment that aligns forecasting, pipeline, backlog, program health, and business review artifacts into a single, synchronized system.
Instead of scattered spreadsheets and siloed SharePoint files, Vector ensures every team is reading from the same sheet of music. Monthly business reviews that once required days of copying, pasting, formatting, and reconciling data can now be generated automatically. Updating program heat charts, rolling forecasts, or actual-versus-budget performance is no longer a manual chore… it’s a button press.
What once required a project manager, analysts, and developers now takes a single expert a fraction of the time. Why buy an expensive software suite that only delivers 10% of what you need when you can build 100% of what you need for a few dollars in tokens?
Next, we are automating our external communications to get the news out sooner. By feeding unclassified statements of work and SME insights into proprietary AI tools, we can generate first-draft press releases the moment a contract is signed – all while staying within the DoW’s rules about information sharing. By starting with an 80% solution, our communications pros can skip right to the fun part: creating a compelling narrative to ensure more people want to learn more about Integer.
These are not just efficiency gains; they are cultural gains. When employees are freed from mundane tasks, their job satisfaction increases. This is supported by 2026 research from Slack’s Workforce Index, which found that daily AI users report 81% higher job satisfaction and 64% higher productivity than their non-using peers.
Left Brain: AI in our Products and Capabilities
While AI is transforming how Integer operates internally, it is also reshaping what our products can do. As part of our capabilities development, Integer has embedded AI into real-time decision support systems through a suite of innovations deployed at a research location. One of the most impactful is an agent-in-the-loop capability that allows operators to control complex electrical power systems using natural language.
Instead of navigating dozens of menus or flipping multiple switches, an operator can simply speak into a microphone:
· “Prepare for battle.”
· “Give me a status report.”
· “Disable component 14 and shift to fuel-saving posture.”
The AI agent interprets the operator’s intent, translates it into structured machine commands, and orchestrates instantaneous adjustments across the entire digital twin and testbed environment. What once took several minutes of manual configuration now happens in seconds. This dramatically reduces cognitive burden, which is critical for mission scenarios where every second counts.
Culture: The Final Multiplier
Technology alone is not a strategy.
To be a tip-of-the-spear company, the culture must match the tools. To wit, at Integer, we’re implementing monthly grassroots Brown Bag sessions where employees from any department, not just developers, demonstrate how they use AI to solve specific problems. Whether it’s an HR specialist using an agent to streamline onboarding or a researcher using AI to parse academic papers, these sessions foster a culture of shared learning.
External research confirms the value of this approach. A 2025 Google Public Policy report found that structured training and giving employees “permission to prompt” can double AI adoption, turning skeptics into power users and saving workers an average of 122 hours per year.
In every discussion about AI at Integer, we come back to a single question: Why not today?
The risks of waiting are no longer theoretical. The 2025 Stanford AI Index Report notes that 78% of organizations have now integrated AI into at least one business function, up from 55% just a year prior. McKinsey research further highlights that high performers (the 6% of companies truly excelling with AI) say their organization has seen significant value from AI use.
A company that decides AI is a trend or too inaccurate to trust is a company that is choosing to stay on course with an iceberg dead ahead. AI, properly prompted and guided, provides a level of consistency and scalability that human effort alone cannot match. We are building what we need, exactly how we need it. By embracing AI in both our operations and our capabilities, we are not just keeping pace with the industry – we are defining its future. The Mesozoic Era is over. The era of the agile, AI-powered squadron has begun.
The only remaining question for our industry is: If you aren’t doing this now, why not today?