The Department of War’s Personal Property Activity — the PPA — is a permanent organization with a clear mandate: fix the PCS moving process for service members and their families once and for all. When Army Maj. Gen. Lance G. Curtis and his team convened an industry day engagement in April, the room was full of moving, shipping, and logistics leaders expecting to talk about peak season readiness, transportation service provider performance, the future of the PCS program, and the operational mechanics of the busiest moving season of the year.
Those conversations happened. But what was notable — striking, even — was what surfaced among the earliest topics of the day.
Before the operational agenda fully took hold, government officials raised pointed questions on behalf of service members and their spouses about data — specifically, the data generated by virtual surveys: where it lives after the survey ends, who can access it, how it is used, and what protections exist for the families whose homes were just recorded, analyzed, and processed through AI systems they never chose and cannot audit.
That these questions came early, and that officials brought them forward on behalf of the people whose homes and lives are most at stake, was not an accident. It was a signal.
Why military families are asking the right questions
Service members and their spouses operate in a world where data security is not abstract. The location of a deployment, the contents of a household, the timing of a move — these details carry operational significance that goes far beyond the inconvenience of a data breach. A leaked moving schedule is a security vulnerability. An AI-generated inventory of household goods stored in a vendor’s cloud is potential intelligence. These families understand, instinctively, what most residential customers do not yet fully grasp: data has consequences that extend well beyond the inbox.
When virtual surveys entered the moving process, they brought real efficiency gains. Less time coordinating on-site visits. Faster cube estimates. Lower friction for families already managing the emotional and logistical weight of a Permanent Change of Station move. But they also introduced something new into the equation: a video record of the interior of a military family’s home, processed by AI, stored by a vendor, accessible to parties the service member never met and cannot audit.
The questions raised at the PPA engagement weren’t directed at any single platform. They were about the category — and the category deserves a serious answer from every company in this industry.
This isn’t just a military problem
Here’s where every moving company reading this needs to lean in, regardless of whether you touch a single government shipment.
If you do corporate relocation, your clients’ HR departments are trusting you with the home addresses, family compositions, and scheduling details of their executives and employees. Those relocation files contain enough information to reconstruct someone’s life — and their vulnerabilities. The companies sending you that work have legal, ethical, and increasingly contractual obligations around data governance. When their legal teams ask how you handle virtual survey data, “we use a third-party platform” is not an answer. It is a liability.
If you do residential moving, you are sitting on something identity thieves and fraud networks actively pursue: real-time information about when homes will be vacant, what valuables are inside, and where families are going next. A virtual survey doesn’t just capture cube — it captures context. The artwork on the wall. The safe in the closet. The medications on the nightstand. That footage lives somewhere after the job closes. The question is whether you know exactly where.
And if you do military work, you already know that compliance requirements are rising, scrutiny is intensifying, and the era of “we’ve always done it this way” is ending — fast.
The common thread across all three is this: virtual surveys transformed the industry’s data footprint in ways many companies haven’t fully reckoned with. The PPA meeting, and the families whose voices opened that agenda, are forcing that reckoning now. Everyone else is next.
The questions every moving company should be able to answer
Before we talk about solutions, let’s be honest about the gap. Most moving companies today could not answer the following questions with confidence:
- Where, physically and jurisdictionally, does survey video and other AI-analyzed data reside after a job is closed?
- Who has access to that data — not just within your company, but within every vendor, sub-processor, and integration partner in your technology stack?
- Is your survey data being used to train AI models? If so, whose models? And does your customer know?
- How long is the data retained, and what is the deletion protocol when the retention window closes — or when a customer requests deletion?
- In the event of a data breach at your survey provider, would you know within 24 hours? Would your customers?
If you can answer all five of those questions precisely, you are ahead of most of the industry. If you are uncertain about even one, you have a gap that may become a liability.
Why MERCED™ was built for this moment
We built MERCED™ because the moving industry deserved an AI that treated data sovereignty as a first principle, not an afterthought.
Most AI tools operate on an invisible bargain: you send us your data, we give you intelligence. That data may be retained, used to train future models, and accessed by parties you never vetted. For a general-purpose tool, that tradeoff might be acceptable. For a moving company handling military shipments, corporate HR files, and residential customer records, it is not.
MERCED™ processes your data within EDC®’s secure, governed environment. For customers with the GPU infrastructure to support it, MERCED™ can also be deployed directly within their own environment, keeping data entirely on their side of the wire. It is also industry-specific, grounded in the operational context of moving and logistics rather than generic training data. That combination of privacy by design and purpose-built intelligence is exactly what the questions coming out of the PPA meeting demand.
What good looks like
The PPA conversation was a gift — even if it didn’t feel like one in the moment. It named the gap between how the industry is operating and what its customers, and increasingly its overseers, actually expect.
Good looks like a moving company that can hand a military family — or a corporate HR director, or a residential customer — a plain-language explanation of what data is collected during a virtual survey, where it lives, who can access it, how long it is retained, and what happens when the move is done. Not a terms-of-service URL. A human explanation.
Good looks like AI tools designed for data minimization — that collect and retain what is operationally necessary, and no more. Not AI that treats your customers’ homes as training data.
Good looks like technology vendors who can answer the five questions above with precision, in writing, before you sign a contract with them.
And good looks like industry leadership that doesn’t wait for a breach — or a congressional inquiry, or a story about a service member’s home survey appearing somewhere it was never authorized to be — to take this seriously.
The PPA and the government officials who brought these concerns forward early that morning — on behalf of service members and their spouses — are increasingly drawing that line. The rest of the market will follow, and sooner than most companies expect.
We are watching, learning, and building for what comes next. From the trenches.
“From the Trenches of AI” is an ongoing EDC® LinkedIn series exploring artificial intelligence through the lens of an industry that moves people, not just data.
