Brandon Card, founder and CEO of the AI financial intelligence platform Terzo, published an op-ed in RealClearPolicy on August 3, 2026, calling on federal agencies to manage contracts as financial assets rather than administrative paperwork. The piece, titled "Government Contracts Are a Financial Asset," highlights the Department of Defense's approximately $445 billion in annual contract obligations across roughly 226,000 active contracts and its eight consecutive failed audits as evidence that agencies lack real-time visibility into their own commitments.
Card's argument centers on the scale of the problem. "No team, regardless of experience or size, can manually understand millions of contracts on a continuous basis," he wrote. The implication is stark: without automated contract intelligence, agencies cannot reliably track what they owe, what they have received, or where money is leaking. That gap directly undermines audit readiness and public-sector accountability.
The op-ed points to AI-assisted contract analysis as the solution, extending the case for contract intelligence from the private sector into government. In the private sector, Terzo provides that visibility through Document AI, which extracts obligations, pricing, and terms from contracts and purchase orders, and Contract Analytics, which turns that extracted data into spend, compliance, and risk dashboards. Card argues these are the categories of tooling that agencies could use to track obligations across large contract portfolios.
For readers in the business and government contracting world, the stakes are significant. If federal agencies adopt contract intelligence at scale, it could reshape how contractors report and negotiate, potentially reducing disputes and improving payment cycles. For taxpayers, better contract oversight could mean less waste and stronger accountability. For the defense industrial base, the shift could introduce new compliance expectations and data transparency requirements.
Terzo, founded in 2020, operates in the United States, Canada, and India, and its platform finds money enterprises lose across third-party and supplier spend ecosystems, including contracts, invoices, purchase orders, and renewals. Card's op-ed signals a strategic push to bring that same financial visibility to the public sector, where the scale of contract obligations dwarfs most private portfolios.
The failed audits at the Department of Defense have long been a symbol of federal financial management challenges. By framing contracts as financial assets, Card is arguing that the problem is not merely one of accounting or compliance, but of financial intelligence. The technology exists, he suggests, to give agencies the same real-time insight that leading enterprises already use. Whether federal agencies embrace that model remains to be seen, but the op-ed adds a prominent voice to the growing debate over AI's role in government accountability and audit readiness.
