Ted Adair is a fourth-generation Army combat veteran and the founder of Oath & Oak, LLC, a veteran-led company in Leesburg, Virginia. Oath & Oak works to give veterans, military spouses, and caregivers economic agency in an AI-enabled world. Ted started the company in July 2025. The company is certified as a Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business by the Small Business Administration, and holds Small and Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned designations under Virginia’s SWaM program.
The company runs three pillars. The Outpost hosts place-based programming and monthly First Friday gatherings in Leesburg. Change of Mission delivers professional development through AI Fieldcraft and The Human Edge. OakLines, produced at The Outpost, is a long-form veteran storytelling podcast with twelve episodes recorded and five released.
Ted and the Oath & Oak team created AI Mission Ready, the five-week AI Fieldcraft sprint and the first veteran cohort built to the U.S. Department of Labor AI Literacy Framework. The pilot ran twelve sessions and closed with a live Demo Day in May 2026. Thirteen veterans completed the program and twelve shipped a working AI workflow, among them an AI chief of staff, a weekly business briefing agent, and a client tracker built by non-coders. Every exit-assessment respondent said they would recommend it.
Ted served as a U.S. Army Field Artillery officer with the 1st Cavalry Division. His first deployment sent him to Kuwait six weeks after the September 11 attacks. His second was a fourteen-month tour in Iraq, where he was senior advisor to a 248-man Iraqi National Guard infantry company, leading a cadre of seven senior noncommissioned officers, and served as assistant battalion operations officer. He led more than 200 combat patrols in central Baghdad and received the Bronze Star Medal and the Combat Action Badge.
Before Oath & Oak, he spent two decades in federal consulting at Booz Allen Hamilton, Hitachi Consulting, Accenture Federal Services, and Guidehouse. At Accenture, he led the pursuits that captured a $307 million IT modernization contract and a $297 million human resources contract. As Director of Growth and Strategy at Guidehouse, he built account plans identifying more than $300 million in net-new pipeline and averaged 25 percent year-over-year sales growth from 2021 through 2024.
He holds a B.A. in English from Villanova University, where he attended on an Army ROTC scholarship, and an M.S. in Applied Information Technology from George Mason University. He was a 2017 ACT-IAC Partners Program Fellow and serves on the advisory board of The Navigator Foundation. He lives in Leesburg with his wife, who teaches high school history in Loudoun County, and their three children.
