AI Consulting in Tysons

FedRAMP and CMMC compliance shapes every decision before a build starts, not after. The first step is a data-residency map: which data touches the workflow, where it lives, who has access, and what boundary controls govern it. For FedRAMP-scoped environments, we route workloads through models and infrastructure with FedRAMP Moderate or High authorization where required — Azure OpenAI Government and AWS GovCloud endpoints are the typical paths. For CMMC Level 2 and above, controlled unclassified information (CUI) cannot flow through commercial model endpoints without appropriate enclave controls, so the architecture shifts accordingly: on-premise or enclave-deployed inference, no external API calls for CUI-touching prompts. We don't skip the compliance layer to ship faster. The audit deliverable for federal IT clients includes a written data-flow diagram and a compliance posture memo the ISSO can review before any production deployment. If the engagement requires a subcontractor cybersecurity assessment under CMMC, we scope that into the pre-build phase rather than treating it as a surprise.

Model risk governance for financial services AI follows a straightforward principle: any AI output that informs a credit decision, risk rating, or client-facing financial recommendation requires a documented human review step before it counts. This isn't optional — SR 11-7 guidance from the Federal Reserve and OCC establishes model risk management expectations that most bank-adjacent firms in Tysons are already operating under. In practice, that means every build we scope for a financial services client includes a review-and-override layer: the AI draft is a work product the analyst reviews, not a decision the system makes autonomously. We also document the model logic, the training data sources, and the expected output distribution so the firm's model risk team can run their own validation. SOC 2 Type II-compliant infrastructure, encrypted data transit and rest, and scoped API access are baseline — not upsells. The $99 audit for financial services clients typically surfaces which workflows are safe to automate end-to-end versus which need the human-in-loop architecture from the start.

Enterprise IT security review for an AI build covers four areas: access control scoping, data egress controls, audit logging, and incident response integration. Access control: every integration uses a dedicated service account with minimum necessary permissions — no admin credentials, no shared accounts, scoped to the specific data sources the workflow touches. Data egress: we document every point where data leaves the firm's environment, including prompts sent to external model endpoints, and the data map is reviewed before any credential is provisioned. Audit logging: all AI-mediated actions are logged with sufficient detail for a SOC team to reconstruct what the system did and why — this matters for both internal audit and external compliance reviews. Incident response: if the AI system behaves unexpectedly, there's a documented kill-switch and escalation path, not a support ticket. For firms with existing enterprise security tools — SIEM integrations, DLP policies, network proxies — we work within those controls rather than around them. The security review documentation becomes part of the build handoff package, not a separate engagement.

Research corpora with distribution controls — FOUO, CUI, or internally restricted technical reports — require a retrieval architecture that respects those controls at the document level, not just the system level. The approach: each document in the index carries its distribution marking as metadata, and the retrieval layer enforces access controls before a document chunk can be included in a response. A user who doesn't have access to a restricted document doesn't see it surfaced in answers, even if it's technically in the index. This requires integrating with whatever identity and access management system the organization already uses — typically Active Directory or an LDAP-compatible directory — so document-level permissions mirror the existing access model rather than creating a parallel permission set to maintain. For MITRE-adjacent teams, the knowledge base is usually a mix of structured technical reports, system engineering documentation, and informal research notes. We index all of it, but the scoping conversation determines which sources are in-scope for the retrieval layer and which stay offline until a separate access review is complete.

The highest-leverage first build for most federal IT integrators in the BD context is a past performance and proposal knowledge retrieval system. The problem is consistent: years of prior contracts, white papers, and capability statements sit in SharePoint or a network drive with no practical way to search them by relevance to a new opportunity. A capture manager working an active RFP has to rely on institutional memory or email chains to find analogous past performance — and under time pressure, that means either writing from scratch or reusing a document that's three years stale. The build ingests the existing repository, chunks and indexes it semantically, and surfaces the most relevant prior work in response to a natural-language query tied to the RFP requirements. The capture manager searches by requirement, gets the three most relevant past performance write-ups, and adapts rather than authors. Scoped correctly — with access controls that match existing SharePoint permissions — this build typically ships in two to three weeks and pays back in the first active proposal cycle.