Who it's for
Blacksky for government agencies
The problem
Government information is public but hard to reach. Rules, programs, eligibility, permits and records live across websites, PDFs and databases, and people call because they cannot find the answer or cannot tell which answer applies to them. Phone lines back up with the same questions, and staff who could handle the hard cases spend their day on the easy ones.
What Blacksky does about it
Blacksky builds agents that answer from an agency's own published material, on the phone and on the web, and hand people to staff when a question needs a person. The agent says where an answer came from, and says plainly when the material does not cover something rather than guessing. Every conversation is logged, and the questions the material could not answer become a list of gaps to fill.
For agencies with large bodies of records, Blacksky makes those records searchable and understandable: structured, indexed by meaning, and readable by an agent.
Relevant work
- USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service. A production AI translation API and platform modernization. See USDA FSIS Translation API and Platform Modernization.
- U.S. Department of Transportation. A permitting dashboard for federal infrastructure projects. See U.S. Department of Transportation, Permitting Dashboard.
- U.S. Department of the Treasury. A multi-site platform migration. See U.S. Department of Treasury, Multi-Site Migration.
- USAID. Environmental database modernization. See USAID Environmental Database Modernization Project.
- The World Bank. An open data platform. See The World Bank, Open Data Platform.
- KnowGov. Blacksky's free, nonpartisan civic platform: officials, bills, votes and elections from official sources, more than 11 million documents, with Shirley, a civic agent on AgentOS, answering from it. See KnowGov.
Across 18 years of federal delivery, Mario has worked with Treasury, DOT, NIH, FDA, OSHA, SEC, FSIS, HHS, USAID and the Department of Education.
How Blacksky works with agencies
Through prime contractors, or as a subcontractor where the work requires a prime. Blacksky understands federal security and compliance expectations, including FISMA, audit trails, and key management, and has held clearances for agency work such as NIH background checks and facility badging.
An agency agent can run on a dedicated stack, separate from any other client, with its data exportable and its costs itemized.
A sensible first step
A demo agent on a slice of the agency's published material: one program, one set of rules, one phone tree. It shows what callers would hear and what the gap list looks like before anything goes into production.
Common questions
Does the agent give legal or eligibility determinations? No. It explains what the published material says and sends anything that needs a determination to staff.
Can it work in other languages? Yes. Spanish and French on the phone today, and translation work is part of Blacksky's federal record.
Where does the data live? In a dedicated stack, not shared with other clients, and exportable.