AI Product · 0→1
OpenSenator — AI Legislative Intelligence
AI-powered legislative intelligence — monitor sessions in real time, deliver strategic insight on demand.
“I have superpowers now.”— State Representative using OpenSenator
The problem
How do you govern in the age of AI? Most elected officials are part-time legislators with full-time constraints — limited staff, limited time, and more bills, transcripts, and constituent input than any human can track. Some of our pilot lawmakers were already reaching for ChatGPT to keep up, and hitting the obvious walls: no access to live session data, no memory of the historical record, and answers that couldn't be trusted on the floor. The opportunity wasn't "add a chatbot." It was to build a tool that actually understood the legislative record and could stand next to a lawmaker during a live session.
What we did
OpenSenator was built as a VeloCT sprint — our AI-native product process. Instead of a months-long discovery-to-delivery cycle, we ran a design-thinking workshop with real lawmakers, turned the output into structured product documentation, and fed that documentation directly into generative AI to stand up a testable product in weeks, not quarters. That speed changed the nature of the work. We weren't designing in the abstract and hoping — we were putting a working tool in front of legislators mid-session and iterating on what they actually did with it, in real time.
Under the hood, OpenSenator grounds a large language model in real legislative data — live transcripts and the historical record — so it can research a position, summarize a week of committee activity, or answer a question about a bill without the hallucination problem that made generic chatbots unusable in this setting.
The result
OpenSenator became an active partner in the chamber, not a reference tool. During session it researches responses, reviews and summarizes transcripts, and lets a lawmaker interrogate both the live conversation and decades of historical data through a simple chat interface. For the legislators piloting it, it's been a genuine force multiplier — the difference between keeping up and getting ahead. The product is live at OpenSenator.com, with AI-powered legislative intelligence as its core promise: monitor sessions in real time, deliver strategic insight on demand.
Why it matters
This is the clearest example of how I work now: a real problem, a sprint that uses AI to compress idea to working software, and a shipped product that earned a lawmaker saying "I have superpowers now." The judgment — what to build, who to build it with, what "trustworthy" means in a government setting — is the part that doesn't come from the model.