In government and industry, people need to know how the worldwide landscape is changing to meet the mission effectively. Global changes “affect their planning and security posture, their facility status,” said Matt McKnight, chief technology officer at Seerist.
For example, government and commercial organizations might have people traveling. “They need to understand the security environment in that place, and they might have a team of three people responsible for making those assessments globally: Deciding whether somebody should travel somewhere or what precautions they should take,” he said.
For many organizations, “it’s very difficult to keep all that information up to date in a world that’s constantly changing, where stuff’s always happening,” he said. Yet, there’s an urgent need for clarity.
A provider of risk intelligence software, Seerist answers that call for over 400 different organizations.
These customers need timely insights. Suppose a negative event unfolds somewhere — an attack on South African mining, for example. “They need to understand whether they need to inform people they have in that country. They need to be able to see that event in the context of an analytical assessment of the environment, or what assets they have there,” McKnight said.
To that end, Seerist’s proprietary software distills millions of data points and then verifies and adds context with human expertise.
“We try and collect just about anything that might be relevant,” McKnight said. In addition to the internet and news feeds, “there are other sources that we subscribe to. There’s quantitative data that is put out by different government organizations — statistics on economics, crime and health.”
From all that unstructured data, Seerist extracts insights into what is going on. “Where are those events happening? Who are they affecting? How severe are they?” he said.
And this goes on all the time, not just in response to specific events. “Every 15 minutes, we’re developing an updated score for a particular country, city, region,” he said “That’s a numerical value that allows them to decide where to focus their efforts, because they can’t pay attention to everything at once.”
The fast-emerging capabilities of artificial intelligence are helping to drive the company’s growth.
McKnight sees great promise in the AI space. By leveraging AI, “we’re looking to expand what we’re doing further into the process that those analysts are doing,” he said. That means “not just getting the right information to them, but also helping them do the research that they need, helping them with their decision making.”
In addition to expanding Seerist’s offerings, this approach also delivers greater impact to the customer. “It allows one user to handle more, to be able to manage a broader portfolio,” he said. “They become more effective and more useful to the organization.”
Also in the realm of adding value to drive growth, Seerist is leaning heavily into its own in-house capabilities.
“We have our own set of human analysts that supplement this AI pipeline,” McKnight said. “They’re performing verification on these events, fact-checking across multiple sources. And we also add analytical content. When somebody is looking at an unfamiliar country, we can pull in the most recent analysis that we’ve written, so they can understand from a more human perspective what’s going on there.”
While all this helps to drive growth, McKnight also is focused on the challenges of the day. “Government is changing how they’re buying things, and we have to be responsive to that,” he said.
Amid the current uncertainty, “we are well positioned, because we’re selling software-as-a-service,” he said. That helps drive cost predictability. And Seerist’s services also answer agencies’ current need to do more with less.
“If you find yourself in the situation where you’re now operating with half the number of people, you can use these tools to supplement the people that you have left, so that they can become more effective,” he said.
A 30-year veteran of the GovCon space, McKnight said he has always been interested in innovation. These days, he sees government trailing industry in that regard and he’s looking to close that gap.
“I like being able to bring advanced technology,” he said. “We’re translating the new things that are coming out, into formats that government is able to consume.”
That often means helping deliver the practical impacts of AI. “Back in the ’90s, I was studying neural networks, doing computational linguistics, Natural Language Processing, and we were extremely limited at the time. We were doing it on comparatively very small computers,” he said. Now, that has changed.
“It’s really exciting to see some of these things finally come to fruition, to see people incorporating these tools into their workflows,” he said. “This is something I’ve been hoping would happen for a long time, and it’s very exciting now that it’s becoming much more accepted and widespread.”