From the Field

Perspectives on AI
in transportation

Case studies, analysis, and ideas from the people building AI for state transportation agencies.

Perspective July 2026

The Filing Cabinet Problem

For forty years, state transportation agencies have built repositories of institutional knowledge — project files, meeting transcripts, inspection reports, decision memos — that were human-readable but machine-invisible. Large language models changed that. Here's what it means for agencies that act first.

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40 yrs of institutional knowledge sitting in document repositories
0 of it machine-readable until now
Now LLMs can read the filing cabinet — the agencies that act first will pull ahead

Perspectives

Perspective July 2026

Any AI Tool, One Knowledge Layer

MCP is the open protocol that lets any AI interface — Microsoft Copilot, Claude, whatever comes next — query your agency's institutional knowledge without a custom integration for each one. Here's why that's a bigger deal than it sounds, and why Beacon built for it from the start.

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