The Tech Transforms podcast, hosted by Owl Senior Vice President Carolyn Ford, continued its exploration of technology’s role in government and defense with two compelling conversations. One episode imagines how AI and blockchain could reshape civic participation; the other surfaces an underexplored frontier of national security―the ocean floor. Together, they provide a unique look into how emerging technology is reworking both democratic institutions and defense innovation.
Episode 128: AI, Agentic Systems, and Rebuilding Digital Democracy (July 7)
In this episode, Ford speaks with Ramon Perez, Executive Director of the Digital Democracy Project, about using technology to close the gap between citizens and their elected representatives. Perez, who brings a background that includes AI, public policy, and military service, argues that the emails, phone calls and town halls relied on for contacting lawmakers are too slow and too easily ignored to give people a meaningful voice in the legislative process.
His proposed fix includes leveraging several technologies: secure mobile voting, blockchain for verifiable record-keeping, digital identity verification, and AI-assisted legislation analysis. The goal is to give citizens better tools to understand what’s actually in a bill and to make their preferences visible to the people voting on it. Perez walks through a working version of the Digital Democracy platform, which lets verified users read AI-generated summaries of pending legislation, track how their representatives actually vote, and see how those votes line up with what constituents said they wanted.
A recurring theme is trust. Perez is careful to frame AI’s role as augmenting judgment rather than substituting for it. The technology should make complex policy legible to more people, not make decisions on their behalf. He also emphasizes that transparency and accountability have to be built into the system from the start if it’s going to earn public confidence. The conversation touches on James Surowiecki’s book The Wisdom of Crowds as a conceptual anchor: large groups of informed people, given the right tools, can often make better collective judgments than small groups of experts working in isolation. For anyone interested in civic tech, AI policy, or the future of representative government, The episode makes a compelling case that technology’s biggest contribution to democracy is making institutions more responsive.
In this episode, Ford turns from legislatures to the ocean floor with guest Abbey Fabian, Strategic Lead at Raytheon and President of Women in Defense’s Greater Boston chapter. The episode centers on “blue tech”, the growing field of underwater technology that is becoming increasingly important to both scientific exploration and national security.
Fabian explains why the ocean is such a punishing environment for technology: pressure, corrosion, and signal loss create engineering constraints that don’t exist on land or in the air. Advances in AI, software-defined systems, and sensing technology are starting to make sustained underwater operations more viable, with implications for everything from ocean science to undersea defense. Fabian also discusses her work bridging startups and established defense primes, offering a candid take on what separates companies that break through from those that don’t.
The conversation broadens into leadership and mentorship. Fabian credits humility and a willingness to ask questions, even when it feels uncomfortable, as some of the most underrated career skills in engineering. She also highlights the work of Women in Defense in supporting professionals not just in engineering, but across finance, HR, marketing, and other disciplines that keep defense organizations running. It’s a reminder that innovation in high-stakes fields depends as much on the people and culture behind the technology as on the technology itself.
The episodes continue the Tech Transforms mission of highlighting the voices and ideas of prominent influencers who are leveraging technology to solve complex government challenges while meeting modern needs: connecting big technical shifts — in AI, blockchain, and sensing — to the human systems, whether governmental or organizational, that have to absorb them.
