I went to the Fathomwerx Summit 2026 expecting to be impressed by the technology. What actually got me was how hands-on and collaborative the whole event was.

700+ people came to Port Hueneme for two days, built around the Master Autonomous Base idea. Naval Base Ventura County is positioning itself as a year-round, multi-domain proving ground for unmanned systems, from the seabed to the airspace. The ambition is real.

For the first time, I saw three CTOs from NAVFAC, NAWC and NSWC share the same stage and answer practical questions on what they’re prioritizing, which technologies they’ve tested, and how those tests actually turned out. The collaboration between government, industry and academia wasn’t a talking point there. You could feel how alive it is, and how much work is going into moving from tests to mission-ready systems.

Out on the exhibition floor, the pattern was clear. Counter-UAS, autonomous surface vehicles, undersea sensors, long-duration platforms, resilient comms for contested environments. The hardware side of autonomy is moving fast, and all of it is collecting more data than ever.

Was AI there? Oh yeah. Plenty of companies have embedded their own agents into their hardware, or are using LLMs to generate reports. Are they in production? Not yet. And honestly, that’s the good news. When you’re talking about the DoW, or government in general, they understand the risk that lives behind a hallucination, behind sending private data to a model, or behind not being able to show where an answer came from when an audit asks. The “shadow AI” problem you see in commercial teams barely exists there, because everyone knows what breaking those rules costs. Nobody is sneaking an LLM into the workflow to save themselves an afternoon.

It was clear that the next battle for agents and automation isn’t capability, it’s trust. That means understanding their ontology and sticking to it, enforcing the right permissions, and delivering the consistency this industry requires. When you’re talking about technology that, as one of the CTOs on stage put it, will save lives, even a 1% hallucination rate isn’t acceptable.

My own takeaway was this. In the near future, the shift moves from building hardware that collects more data, faster than before, to figuring out how all that collected intelligence becomes a battlefield decision advantage. In practice, these systems aren’t going to stay sensors that collect and hand off. They’re moving toward sharing what they find with other systems.

That’s exactly where we come in. We focus on the use cases, and the industries, where it isn’t acceptable to hand any proprietary data to a model, where they need end-to-end audit, and where determinism lives on every step that touches their data. That means letting them own the models and the IP, and giving them the decision advantage they need.

If you were at Hueneme, this probably sounds familiar. You’ve got autonomous and sensor systems producing data faster than anyone can sit and watch, and you’re starting to let those systems act on what they find.

You need answers that hold up when someone asks how they were calculated. And the data can’t leave your environment to get them. That’s the whole design: connect directly to the systems already producing the data, run inside your environment, no data movement, no central warehouse to stand up first.

I can’t wait to keep engaging with this industry and to show how Chata.ai can join forces on the next battle for enterprise agents, the one about agents trust, not capability.