Georgia Tech Students Merge Analytics and Public Policy to Build Legislative AI Tool

Posted February 18, 2026

Keeping pace with the rapid movement of state and federal legislation is a high-stakes challenge for organizations and policymakers. To address this, a pair of Georgia Tech data analytics students developed Politheon, an AI agent-driven legislative tracking platform shaped by rigorous data analytics, a boost from Georgia Tech’s CREATE-X, and critical insights from data scientists in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.

Co-founded by Daniel Forcade and Hanna Bodnar, recent graduates of Georgia Tech’s Master of Science in Analytics program, Politheon is designed to overcome the limitations of standard artificial intelligence in providing businesses and other organizations with accurate and actionable information about legislative activity.

Bodnar credits the team's collaboration with Associate Professor Omar Asensio’s Data Science and Policy Lab in the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Public Policy for helping shape the platform.

"Collaborating with Professor Asensio’s lab was pivotal," Bodnar said. "As engineers, we had to expand our perspective beyond the technical implementation and deeply understand how public policy researchers and practitioners interpret legislative data. That interdisciplinary feedback helped us design a system that is both technically rigorous and policy-aware."

Forcade agreed, saying it took the combined resources of CREATE-X and the collaboration with Asensio’s lab to make Politheon what it is.

“CREATE-X gave us the business foundation to build and scale, while our collaboration with Professor Asensio’s lab helped us strengthen the scientific rigor behind the system. In policy, it's incredibly important to have testing, validation, and empirical grounding behind what you build.”

When it comes to understanding the potential impact of sometimes obliquely written legislation, precision and insight are vital. Publicly available large language models often struggle in these environments, sounding authoritative but often hallucinating in place of facts and failing to reason out the hidden impacts of legislation. Politheon, however, offers a potential solution, Asensio said.

"This is a very exciting use case for agentic AI in the context of evidence-informed policy," he said.

The project originally started as the final project for Bodnar and Forcade’s analytics program. Forcade said their instructors encouraged them to apply to CREATE-X to take the project further.

Forcade said CREATE-X liked the idea but asked them to talk to more experts. Forcade and Bodnar then reached out to Asensio.

Asensio was enthusiastic and invited them to present at his lab, where his team spent two and a half hours offering Forcade and Bodnar intensive constructive feedback. The duo has been collaborating with the lab ever since.

Asensio noted that this kind of cross-pollination is an embedded feature of his lab.

"We often start with data or policy solutions to guide technical development, and not the other way around," Asensio said. "This means our technologists learn to do causal inference and policy impact evaluation, and our policy scholars learn to code and train models and algorithms as part of their work."

That focus on critical evaluation aligns seamlessly with the founders' technical training.

"My background in mathematics and Georgia Tech’s Analytics program gave me a strong foundation in statistical modeling and machine learning systems," Bodnar said. "The program emphasizes not just building models but evaluating them rigorously. That mindset shaped how we designed Politheon, especially how we validate outputs and measure accuracy in a space where precision really matters."

The platform is already demonstrating its capabilities. Recent agent outputs include a large-scale scan of more than 25,000 Oregon bills, drawn from a broader searchable database of over 1.6 million state and federal bills, identifying emerging trends in artificial intelligence regulation. The system has also delivered validated, cross-jurisdictional analysis of “buy-now-pay-later” legislation in New York and Congress, with findings reviewed by senior government affairs professionals, tracing how the issue emerged and how it evolved over time.

The startup recently secured $100,000 in funding which helped build complete, and near real-time, data coverage across the federal government and  all U.S. states.

“The raise enabled us to bring in the live data stream,” Forcade said. “With real-time coverage in place, we’re now advancing pricing discussions and pilot rollouts with multiple organizations.”

Ultimately, the platform is designed to provide clarity amid the noise of modern governance.

"Policy moves quickly, and missing a compliance date or legislative shift can be costly," Bodnar said. "Our goal is to surface what’s relevant, explain why it matters, and provide clear citations to the original bills so teams can make informed decisions with confidence.”