North Highland attended the Colorado Technology Association's June Insights Series on June 25, 2026, at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. The session brought together technology and operations leaders from Denver International Airport (DEN), Regional Transportation District (RTD), E-470, United Airlines, and Waymo.
Getting people from point A to point B has never been more complex, or more interesting. The conversation moved fast, covering autonomous vehicles, AI-driven operations, workforce development, and data interoperability. Four things kept coming up.
DEN's Juan Lucero described a shift to a cloud-based data fabric to connect airport systems, airline partners, and regional data sources. RTD's Brett Feddersen announced a unified rider app launching in July, replacing five separate apps and enabling location updates in near real time (replacing the current updates every three to five minutes). E-470's Joe Donahue pointed to the same shift on the infrastructure side: rather than waiting for roads to fail, E-470 is using technology to monitor assets and schedule maintenance proactively. Each of them pointed to the same opportunity: the data and tools are already available or implemented; the work now is making sure their teams are set up to actually use them.
Each panelist described where their organization fits in a single passenger journey. DEN focuses on the experience from someone's front door to the gate. United picks up from boarding. RTD, E-470, and Waymo cover how people get to and from the airport and around the region. Mapped together, the full journey showed real progress at every leg and point to the handoffs as the next opportunity. To paraphrase Waymo's own Adam Lane put it practically: the most productive conversations start with agreeing on what problem you're trying to solve. Getting that answer first is what makes interoperability work.
DEN installed LIDAR sensors and machine learning at security checkpoints to give travelers accurate, real-time wait time estimates, replacing static calculations with a model that adjusts dynamically as lane configurations change. Waymo runs billions of simulated miles before deploying vehicles in a new market, stress-testing scenarios that are unlikely but not impossible. RTD is using data to give board members and executives cleaner information for scheduling and service decisions. These are live operations, not experiments.
To close, the moderator asked each panelist for one thing: what does a connected transportation system require? The answers from a room full of technology executives: collaboration, leadership, and bravery.
Aylene McCallum put it this way:
"The answers have nothing to do with technology. They have to do with people and people making decisions, making relationships, and building bridges."
Each organization on stage has made real progress on the technology side. What they said they needed more of was simpler: the will to work across boundaries and bring people along.
The conversations at CTA's June Insights Series reflect a sector that has invested heavily in technology and is now focused on getting more out of those investments. Cross-agency collaboration, workforce development, and organizational readiness kept coming up, not as buzzwords, but as the actual work leaders said they needed to do more of.
That's where North Highland works. We partner with transportation agencies and operators on the organizational side of large-scale technology change, helping teams build the capability, structures, and coordination needed to make their investments deliver.
If your organization is working through any of these same challenges, let's talk.