Onebrief Innovation & Technology Culture

How does your team stay ahead of emerging technology trends while scaling fast?

What’s most important is maintaining an ongoing investment in understanding what is rapidly changing across the technology landscape. Particularly with a mission as fundamental as Onebrief’s, there is a mandate to deeply understand new capabilities, separate bubbles from genuine change, and anticipate where technology can transform what we deliver to military command. That means staying closely engaged with emerging developments, especially in areas like AI, and continually evaluating how those capabilities might improve how complex operations are planned and coordinated.

Awareness alone is not enough. The real work comes from exploring how new technologies perform in practice. Our teams experiment with new approaches while staying closely connected to how the platform is used in real operational environments. Our customer relations team works alongside users every day and brings those insights back into how we evaluate and evolve the product. By grounding exploration in real problems and real users, we can scale our platform while continuing to incorporate technologies that meaningfully improve how military organizations plan and make decisions.

What recent product or feature are you most proud of — and what impact has it had?

We are beginning to see what becomes possible when agentic AI and advanced simulation capabilities are applied to real military workflows. At Onebrief, AI Assist, together with our recent Battle Road acquisition, is an early example of that shift. AI Assist helps planners interpret, summarize, and reason through complex operational plans and military information so they can focus on the mission. 

Operational planning requires synthesizing large amounts of information, coordinating across many teams and constantly adapting plans as conditions change. AI Assist is an early step toward introducing intelligent systems that help planners navigate that complexity while keeping humans firmly in control of decisions. 

The addition of Battle Road expands that work by bringing expertise in simulation and real-time operational decision support. Their background in applying gaming technology to defense problems opens the door to new ways of wargaming and stress testing decisions before operations unfold. Most exciting has been how quickly this combination has expanded the conversation with our customers and inspired new development initiatives across our teams.

How do you create a culture where innovation and experimentation are encouraged daily?

Creating a culture of innovation starts with ensuring teams have the time and space to explore ideas and turn those explorations into genuine innovation for both our customers and our internal teams. That only works if experimentation is connected to real outcomes rather than treated as an abstract exercise. 

At Onebrief, our engineers, product teams and customer-facing teams work closely with experienced operational planners. That connection allows teams to see how new ideas affect our users’ day-to-day work and the way complex operations are planned and coordinated. Our mission to make military command superhuman is incredibly ambitious, and the closer teams are to real problems and real users, the more naturally innovation follows.

How do engineers influence innovation and product strategy?

The biggest thing is customer feedback. It realigns what you’re doing and you stop guessing. Everyone says they want it. The difficulty is that talking to a customer might tell you that you’re wrong. You have to be willing to hear that.

At Onebrief, we talk to users as widely and deeply as possible, including going into their environments. We also have dedicated customer teams, so what they learn gets back to product owners and engineers in a fast loop. Engineers can then help decide what we should build, not just how to build it.

A recent example was replacing a loading bar with descriptive steps that explain what the software is doing. The work takes the same amount of time, but the experience feels faster and more human.

That’s a small change, but an important point. Innovation doesn’t always mean adding something bigger. Sometimes it means seeing the same problem from the customer’s side and building something they can understand.
 

How do you decide when to adopt new tech or tools?

It comes down to cost versus benefit. Does this actually make something easier, or have we just added another thing to manage? We’re constantly trying new tools because you have to use them to find out where that balance is.

A recent personal example is ChatGPT. I had it find my kids’ back-to-school list in my email, then use a browser to put the supplies into a Walmart basket. It went from finding the information to doing something useful with it.

That’s what interests me about connecting AI to the services we already use. Answering a question is useful. Taking work off your hands is a different level of useful.

I drive platform-wide agentic solutions at Onebrief and that’s how I look at new technology. What job can it help someone get done? How much effort does it remove and how much does it introduce? Being new is a reason to try something. It isn’t, by itself, a reason to adopt it.
 

What practices help engineers balance experimentation and reliability?

Testing the software matters. So does testing your assumptions about the people using it. At Onebrief, we involve customers as early as possible, so their feedback helps shape what actually gets built.

People get used to their software. They learn where things are and how to get their work done. Change that environment and you’ve given them another job: learning it again. Even a change that looks better to an engineer can make life harder for the person using it.

That’s why I think new products or separate experiences are often the best place to try a fundamentally different approach. You can explore without constantly rearranging something people already depend on.

It’s important to get the experience right the first time. That doesn’t mean guessing until you think it’s perfect: It means getting feedback while the design is still easy to change, rather than making customers live with your guesses.