Navigating the AI-on-AI Era: Introducing Insights Investigator for Agentic Risk Intelligence
Threat actors are no longer constrained by human bandwidth. Nation-state adversaries, organized criminal networks, and hostile foreign intelligence services are deploying AI to accelerate disinformation campaigns, manufacture synthetic identities, probe supply chains, and conduct influence operations at an industrial scale.
From the SCIF to the SOC to the compliance desk, the same dynamic is unfolding: AI is being used to attack, and defenders relying on manual investigation are outpaced before the first query even runs.
To level the playing field, organizations need a fundamental shift from reactive data queries to proactive, real-time investigations that match the speed and scale of AI-fueled risk. That shift requires an Agentic Risk Intelligence approach.
Generic AI agents weren't built for high-stakes investigation. They operate on open data without provenance, without governance, and without the rights-cleared signal that defensible decisions require. Agentic Risk Intelligence is different by design.
Today, Babel Street is introducing the first AI agent ecosystem built for Agentic Risk Intelligence. Insights Investigator, a new agentic AI capability within Babel Street Insights accelerates and scales elite tradecraft with AI agents operating under human control.
Our philosophy for Insights Investigator is simple: Intent in. Decision out.
The friction in the intelligence cycle
In many high-stakes investigations, the most time-consuming work comes before analysis begins — figuring out where to start, what matters, what to look for next, and assembling findings to be usable. Analysts can’t scale to match AI-fueled risks using their existing tools. Traditional workflows create friction and slow down investigations precisely when speed matters most.
Designed with expert practitioners, Insights Investigator is built to reduce that friction, providing analysts with intelligent AI agents that can work alongside them and at their instruction. By automating the heavy lifting of data triage, synthesis, and extraction, Insights Investigator helps analysts move smoothly from intent to validated intelligence.
The result? Analysts produce stronger conclusions in less than one-fifth the time – translating directly into faster defensible decisions, more analyst capacity, and reduced exposure to risks that would otherwise slip through manual workflows.
How Insights Investigator strengthens analyst tradecraft
Insights Investigator frees analysts to focus on critical thinking and strategic decision making. Here is how it transforms the investigative workflow:
1. Starting no longer depends on knowing where to begin — Investigator starts with intent. Instead of forcing users to translate uncertainty into complex search syntax, analysts can input a question, concern, or objective in plain language. Insights Investigator turns early questions into a structured investigative pathway, making it easier to begin work even when dealing with complex or unfamiliar problems.
2. The research approach is visible before execution — Unlike black-box AI systems, Investigator is “human-in-control” by design. From an analyst’s initial intent, Insights Investigator presents a research plan detailing how it will approach the problem: what it will look at, how it will gather information, and how results will be assembled. It prompts the user to review, edit, or refine the plan, ensuring the research aligns with the analyst’s expectations and tradecraft before a single query runs.
3. Scalable research fueled by Data Dominance™ — Once approved, AI agents execute the plan across approved, multilingual sources. Fueled by Babel Street’s Data Dominance, Insights Investigator draws from rights-cleared, mission-curated, multilingual signals and proprietary enrichment pipelines other providers can’t access or replicate. Analysts remain in control while Insights Investigator handles discovery, data sifting, and intelligence assembly, often surfacing hidden leads, connections, or follow-ups that would be nearly impossible to discover manually.
4. Every finding is human validated and defensible — Insights Investigator returns every finding with full source provenance and transparent reasoning into how it was assembled. This allows analysts to examine relevance, check assumptions, and confirm accuracy before findings are used to inform critical, defensible decisions. True confidence comes not from automation but from the analysts’ ability to verify and understand the work themselves.
From insight to impact
The intelligence cycle doesn't end with discovery. After findings are reviewed and validated, Insights Investigator helps carry intelligence forward by assembling summaries, briefings, or reports for broader audiences. In practice, reducing this synthesis and formatting work saves as much time as accelerating the research itself.
From the field – Mercyhurst University CIRAT
Insights Investigator is in use at Mercyhurst University's Center for Intelligence Research, Analysis and Training (CIRAT), where the next generation of intelligence analysts are training on the same agentic workflows they'll deploy in their careers.
“Insights Investigator transforms how our analysts operate. What used to take days of manual collection now takes hours without sacrificing the sourcing discipline our customers depend on. When you are tracking illicit financial networks or monitoring fast-moving threat indicators, that kind of compression changes what’s possible.”
— Brian Fuller, Executive Director, Office of Strategic Initiatives and Center for Intelligence Research, Analysis, and Training (CIRAT) at Mercyhurst University.
Babel Street is the only Agentic Risk Intelligence platform that combines rights-cleared, mission-grade data with governed AI agents to deliver decision-ready intelligence. Insights Investigator helps analysts move from a simple question to trusted intelligence more effectively by keeping validation, judgment, and accountability firmly human.
The result isn’t just quicker answers. It’s better discovery, clearer understanding, and total confidence in how conclusions are reached.
In the next section, we’ll walk you through an example investigation workflow using Insights Investigator.
Insights Investigator in action
1. User expresses intent without needing to speak in search syntax
2. Insights Investigator develops a research plan — a structured approach to gathering required information.
Users can edit the plan to ensure it meets their expectations and tradecraft before its executed
3. Insights Investigator gathers, organizes, and synthesizes data from Insights’ rights-cleared, mission-grade, multilingual data — often surfacing leads and connections that would be difficult to discover manually.
4. The user can inspect and edit the AI-created queries powering the findings to refine results to what matters.
5. Every finding is traceable back to its origin. The emphasis is not just speed, but improved discovery with confidence in where information comes from.
A platform growing ahead of the threat
Insights Investigator is the first step in Babel Street's broader roadmap to embed increasingly advanced AI agents and multimodal intelligence across the Insights platform — expanding tailored investigative agents, enhancing computer vision capabilities, and further automating workflows to help analysts move faster and operate with greater precision.
That expansion continues in June 2026 with the introduction of Image Analysis, extending Insights Investigator with a visual intelligence layer. Rather than treating images as standalone outputs, Investigator incorporates visual signals — including text, objects, and locations — into the same underlying intelligence picture that connects identities, activity, and relationships across the platform. This enables analysts to move beyond isolated detections to a more complete, multi-dimensional understanding of risk.
Better discovery with defensible conclusions
Babel Street is the only Agentic Risk Intelligence platform that combines rights-cleared, mission-grade data with governed AI agents to deliver decision-ready intelligence. Insights Investigator helps analysts move from a simple question to trusted intelligence by keeping validation, judgment, and accountability firmly human.
The result isn't just quicker answers. It's better discovery, defensible conclusions, and scaled analyst capacity, without ceding judgment or control to a black box.