The Department of Defense's push to adopt AI at scale, formalized in three coordinated memoranda in January 2026, has reshaped defense contracting for over a year. In the six months after its December 2025 launch, the Pentagon's enterprise AI platform GenAI.mil grew from 80,000 daily users to 1.5 million. Margarita Howard, who founded defense contractor HX5 in 2004 and leads a workforce of close to 1,000 people, has been investing in AI tools and preparing for AI-driven procurement changes for years. Her teams face the daily question of where automation improves sensitive government contract work and where it compromises it. HX5 structures its work across research and development, engineering, information technology, and mission operations. Howard says, "If you don’t embrace AI, you’re just going to be gone. We’re adopting it heavily." In IT and compliance-adjacent work, the company has seen direct productivity gains, developing internal AI tools for repeatable, rule-bound tasks like running consistent checks and tracking system configurations. Research and development work requires domain knowledge and contextual understanding, where a model can process data but cannot replicate the institutional knowledge of a cleared engineer.