//For the firms that run investigations and security operations
AI for Investigation and Security Firms
Matt Aubin, AI investigation expert and cybercrime specialist, founder of Southern Recon Agency and E3 Legacy Intel, 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 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 added an AI exclusion to the policy. What do we do?
Get your AI use written down before the carrier asks. Some errors and omissions carriers now exclude AI related claims or ask at renewal how AI is used in the work they insure. 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. A firm that cannot has a coverage problem on top of an evidence problem. The signed AI evidence audit exists for this: a document you hand the insurer, renewed every year.
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.
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.
//What he does for you
Three things, each with its own page.
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, and a September 2026 census of the investigators who publicly present as AI experts found only two licensed investigators in the country who state on their own pages that they built their own AI investigation platform, and he is one of them. He trained a delegation of Brazilian prosecutors at World Orlando, the State Department sponsored conference in Orlando, and Intellenet's 2026 conference agenda lists him for "A-I for the Modern Private Investigator" on April 15, 2026. He authored the Evidence-Grade AI Standard that the seat, the build and the audit are held to.
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.