//For the firms that run investigations and security operations
AI for Investigation and Security Firms
Matt Aubin works with the owners of investigation firms and the leaders of security operations who want AI in the work without AI wrecking the work. He built the AI his own investigation firms run on. He does three things for yours: a monthly advisory seat, a custom private build, and a signed AI evidence audit.
By Matt Aubin, Founder, Southern Recon Agency and E3 Legacy Intel. CDFE, FBCI. Investigating since 2009. Updated .
//The problems, in your words
Five things owners say on the first call.
Security is a bigger industry than investigation and the problems are the same: the insurer, the chatbots, the reports, the workflow, and the build or buy question. Each one below is answered straight.
Our insurer has started asking how we use AI. What do we hand them?
Whatever they ask for, you want it written down before you are asked rather than assembled under a deadline. A firm that can show written rules, a record of how AI touches its cases, and a named person accountable for the output has an answer ready. A firm that cannot is answering from memory. The signed AI evidence audit is that answer as one dated document, signed by a named and credentialed person and renewed every year. What your carrier does with it is between you and your broker, and nothing on this page predicts that.
My staff are pasting case data into chatbots. How do I stop the bleeding?
You do not stop AI use, you replace the free for all with rules and a system. Investigators and analysts use chatbots because they save hours, and telling them to stop only pushes it underground. The fix is a written rule set for what may go into which tool, an approved way of working that is faster than the chatbot, and a check on every output before it reaches a client. The advisory seat writes the rules with you, and a private build gives your people something better than a public chatbot to use.
We want AI writing reports, but not at the cost of quality. Is that possible?
Yes, if the machine writes the first draft and a person owns the last one. AI is very good at turning sourced facts into a clean first draft and very bad at knowing which facts are true. Done right, every claim in the draft points at a source, a qualified person checks the draft against those sources, and the check is recorded. Reports go out faster and the quality goes up, because the human time moves from typing to checking. That is how the AI inside Matt's own firms works.
Which parts of our workflow should be automated, and which should not?
Automate the gathering, the cross referencing, the monitoring and the first draft. Keep the judgment, the legal calls, the client conversations and the final finding human. In a security operation the same line holds: AI can triage alerts, correlate signals and draft the incident summary, and a named person decides what it means and what happens next. The first month of the advisory seat maps your workflow against that line and tells you, step by step, what to hand to the machine.
Does this cover workplace, corporate and fraud investigations?
Yes to all three. AI in workplace investigations, AI in corporate investigations and AI in fraud investigations are the three places a firm most often has AI touching a finding somebody will later question, and they are the three where the record matters most. The work is the same in each: sourced inputs, a method that can be described, a human who checks the output and signs for it, and a record that survives being read by a stranger.
Should we build our own AI or buy a product?
Buy when a product does the job and you can live with your data on its servers. Build when the work is yours alone, the data is sensitive, or the product would shape how your firm works instead of the other way round. Most firms need a mix, and the expensive mistake is a build that should have been a purchase, or a purchase that quietly became the firm's method. Matt has made both calls for his own firms and writes the build or buy decision for yours, with reasons, once.
Ready to talk about your firm?
One conversation sorts out whether it is a seat, a build or the signed audit, and the scope comes back in writing.
//What he does for you
The three things he does for an investigation or security firm.
One
The monthly advisory seat
A standing advisor on your calls, in your boardroom, by email and in written reports. Build orders when something needs building, and help running AI inside the firm every month. Priced on value and results, never hours.
Two
The custom private build
For investigation and security companies, and other firms, that want their own system: Matt builds and maintains a private AI system for one client that nobody else runs. The engine his own firms run on is never handed over; your system is designed around your casework or your security operation, built, tested on your live matters, and kept running by the person who built it. A build stands on its own; it does not need a seat.
Three
The signed AI evidence audit
A signed document a firm can hand its insurer: how AI is used in the firm's work, what is recorded, who checks the output, and what is disclosed, checked against the Evidence-Grade AI Standard and signed by Matt Aubin. Renewed every year.
//Proof
Why a firm owner listens to this person
Investigating since 2009. Founded his first firm in 2010 and built it into Southern Recon Agency in 2014. He built a proprietary AI investigation platform his own firms run on live cases. He trained a delegation of Brazilian prosecutors at World Orlando, the State Department sponsored conference in Orlando, and he delivered "A-I for the Modern Private Investigator" at Intellenet's 2026 conference on April 15, 2026. He authored the Evidence-Grade AI Standard that the seat, the build and the audit are held to.
If what you actually want is agents doing real work inside the firm, and a way to check what they did on a live client file, that is AI agents for investigation and security firms. The standard this work is held to is set out on the Evidence-Grade AI page, and the figures an insurer will quote at you come from the FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report, laid out on the AI fraud numbers page. Firms that run security operations have their own page, AI for security operations.
Tell me what AI is doing inside your firm today.
The insurer letter, the chatbot habit, the report backlog, or the build you are weighing. You get a straight answer on which of the three it is.