Every so often TSA holds a webinar for small businesses that want to sell to the agency. It is routine. Companies ask how to get on a contract vehicle, what a set-aside is, who to call. TSA answers, and posts the answers publicly.
On July 17, TSA posted the answers from the June session. Question eight asked how TSA is incorporating artificial intelligence into its modernization roadmap and what capabilities it wants from industry.
The answer is one paragraph. It is worth reading slowly, not because it is alarming, but because it is specific.
What TSA Said
TSA Small Business Webinar Questions and Answers, July 17, 2026
Most of that list is infrastructure. Cybersecurity, vetting, contact centers. Four items are not.
Enhancing Detection in Screening Systems
This is already happening. In early July, an AI vendor announced it had become the first to receive TSA certification for prohibited item detection on a CT carry-on scanner, and that the software is already installed at PreCheck lanes at several airports. The system automatically detects prohibited items and presents the results to the operator.
Image interpretation is what an officer does at the X-ray position. It is also a scored metric in the Gold+ contract.
Optimizing Staffing and Throughput With Predictive Models
TSA plans to use AI to determine staffing.
Read that against what TSA told the companies bidding on Gold+ in its written answers this month. Asked whether it would assign a required number of officers per airport, TSA said it will not prescribe specific staffing numbers or FTEs, and that the contractor proposes the plan. Asked whether a bidder could propose reductions in staff through more efficient use of technology to meet the price ceiling, TSA declined to say no.
The agency will not set a staffing floor in the contract. It does intend to apply predictive models to staffing.
Augmenting Workforce Skills Through Mixed Reality Training
Mixed reality is the technical term for what most people call augmented reality.
The Department of Homeland Security holds two patents for an augmented reality screening system. One of its named inventors is a former leader of TSA's Innovation Task Force who now works for the firm that installs screening systems in nearly every TSA airport. The patents describe a system that guides an operator through alarm resolution, and state, in their own words, that it can walk an operator through complex procedures "regardless of the level of training of the operator."
TSA has now listed mixed reality workforce training as something it wants from industry.
Applying Large Language Models to Streamline Procedures and Workflows
The second of those patents does exactly this. It digitizes the Standard Operating Procedure into a decision tree and walks the officer through it with simple questions, so the operator does not have to know where in the manual the answer lives.
What This Means for You
Nothing in this document says anyone's job is going away. It is a vendor outreach paragraph, and every federal agency has an AI wish list. TSA is not announcing a plan to replace officers, and we are not going to tell you it is.
What it does is name four capabilities, in the agency's own words, that touch the specific things you do: reading the image, being scheduled, being trained, and following procedure. We have documented each of those separately over the past several months from patents, procurement records, and vendor announcements. This is the first time we have seen them listed together by TSA.
Why We Want You to Know
For the technology direction and the people building it, see Inside the Firm That Builds Nearly Every TSA Checkpoint. For what TSA told the Gold+ bidders about staffing, see No Number.
There is no secret here. TSA published this on a contracting portal, in response to a question from a company that wanted to know what to sell them. That is the point. The clearest statement we have seen of where the agency intends to take this technology was written for vendors, not for the workforce that will be standing in front of it.
If you want to understand how this would apply to your own situation, that is a conversation worth having. It costs you nothing. againstgiantsllc.com/get-help.html or info@againstgiantsllc.com