Announcing Primer Command: Real-Time, AI-Driven Situational Awareness

The events of last week have changed the world as we have come to know it. We woke up to a war in Europe, and Russian forces advancing on the city of Kyiv. The world now feels more uncertain, volatile, and complex. The so-called “fog of war” has descended around us and we struggle to make sense of what we are witnessing, with disinformation being weaponized to generate further confusion. But decisions still have to be made, and these decisions will alter the course of history. 

We built Primer for this exact scenario. We started Primer to put the best machine learning tools in the world into the hands of the very people who are required to make decisions to protect communities, civil liberties, critical assets and infrastructure, and our way of life. What we deliver to them makes a difference, and the timeline to deliver has never been more urgent.

Today, we’re making Primer Command generally available to a much wider audience of public and private sector organizations. Command is our AI-driven situational awareness solution that is deployed in technology, financial, security and other critical industry sectors to help users meet an ever-widening array of high-stakes security challenges and opportunities. 

Please read on to learn more about what Command can do for your organization, and contact me directly if you’d like to discuss how Primer can support your mission.

– Sean

 

 

 


 

 

 

Today, Primer announces a new solution for monitoring fast-breaking global events: Primer Command. Powered by Primer’s advanced natural language processing (NLP) technology, Primer Command enables organizations to monitor, analyze, and respond to rapidly unfolding events in real time. Primer Command is the industrial-grade security and crisis management solution that can structure and summarize a high volume of real-time publicly available information, including news and social feeds, at speed, and with human-grade precision. 

Command brings intelligence to all levels of decision making, including strategic, operational, and tactical, and streamlines communications so that teams can operate in real time from a shared understanding of the situation.

Why we built Primer Command

In today’s complex world, real-time situational awareness is critical for the public and private sector to effectively respond to major world events, such as armed conflict, natural disasters, terror and cyber attacks, or geopolitical unrest. Organizations need to make timely decisions regarding the security of their people, assets, and critical infrastructure, as well as ensure operational continuity. Yet when a crisis strikes, threat assessment and operational intelligence teams are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information coming from news and social media — and that information can evolve from one minute to the next. 

 

 

 

 



“Military commanders and business leaders live in an increasingly complex information environment, which is a morass of equal parts champagne and swill. Rapidly sorting through fact and fiction and pertinent information to enable time-sensitive decisions is both more important and more difficult.” 

 

– Tony Thomas, Former Commander, U.S. Special Operations Command

 

 


We are now extending our technology to help commercial businesses, who face similar challenges, solve their most critical problems. Using Primer’s world leading AI technology, Command provides a 360-degree view of a rapidly evolving event or emerging threat. It leverages AI-powered intelligence tools to quickly separate signal from noise, enabling organizations to focus on strategic priorities and make fast, timely decisions with confidence.

Analysts and decision makers use Primer Command to:

  • Monitor a wide range of global data sources including news, social media, and situation reports (SITREPS) in more than 100 languages.
  • Understand the entire picture of a breaking situation within a rich global and historical context.
  • Gather rich context of an event from extracted and deduplicated images and videos aggregated together into one single view. 
  • Extract insights from various data fused together, such as text, images, and video, using integrated AI technologies like computer vision and NLP.  
  • Geofence a particular area of interest to keep track of relevant changes over time. 
  • Detect narrative patterns and trends by identifying and understanding disputed information.
  • Separate signal from noise by removing duplicate information. Even if authors use different words to describe the same thing.
  • Generate knowledge bases fast to understand the people, places, and organizations that matter most.

With Command, intelligence professionals no longer need to rely on rudimentary tools and manual methods to discover salient information and stitch together insight reports — especially when every minute counts. Primer Command delivers reliable, real-time data at scale, saving analysts countless hours and freeing them to focus on higher-level analysis.

Command in action

Primer Command supports image recognition, deduplication, and clustering to help analysts process enormous volumes of real-time data with human-grade precision.
Primer Command’s real-time AI-generated situation reports enable analysts to track breaking events faster and maintain a comprehensive understanding of the impact, implications, and outcomes of events.

Inside Primer Command 

Primer Command surfaces key insights on a breaking event from a single dashboard that’s updated in real time using situational awareness tools. Data flows in from over 60,000 news and social media sources, providing a robust OSINT data feed to ensure that analysts have a comprehensive view of the event. Analysts can then apply powerful filters to extract the information that they care about most, such as key people, organizations, locations, potential disputed information, engagement, keywords, disputes, sentiment, or languages. They can also run a query on affiliation or relationships between people to gain a deeper understanding of key players. 

Command integrates several key AI technologies into one seamless user experience that allows analysts to extract insights from different data formats without ever leaving the platform:

  • Named Entity Linking maps text into geographic locations, creating a visual of where unfolding events are happening. 
  • Advanced computer vision technology groups similar images together, allowing analysts to conduct visual searches, finding different perspectives of the same event, and identifying a wide angle version when the initial image was tightly cropped.
  • Optical character recognition (OCR) technology identifies and translates text embedded in images. 
  • ML algorithms are optimized for speed to support low latency workflows in rapidly evolving situations.

When analysts need to share information with others, Primer Command generates a real-time situation report within seconds, enabling collaboration across users, teams, and organizations, helping leaders to quickly gain a comprehensive understanding of the event and make data-driven decisions.

Primer Command at work

A wide variety of organizations are monitoring and responding to fast-breaking global events, from corporate global security to teams in charge of humanitarian response and tracking global cyber attacks. With Primer Command’s real-time event monitoring and alerting capabilities intelligence teams gain a comprehensive understanding of the impact and implications of an event. 

Primer Command’s real-time event and risk detection capabilities empower global enterprises to monitor threats and build effective communications strategies.

  • Corporate Global Security Operation Centers (GSOC): Security analysts use Command to monitor and respond to crises that affect company assets, personnel, and critical infrastructure across multiple geographies.
On 23 February 2022, Primer Command captured the first news and social media reports that Russia had declared war on Ukraine and the country was under attack.

 

  • Humanitarian Response: Humanitarian organizations and first responders use Command’s custom-trained humanitarian filters to identify crucial information from disaster zones and quickly respond to rapidly evolving emergencies. With Command, first responders can pinpoint exact locations, both mention and geo-tag, for accurate situational awareness, helping to ensure staff safety, while delivering well coordinated and targeted assistance.
Primer’s advanced humanitarian AI filters enable analysts to quickly identify breaking reports of infrastructure damage and evacuations as Russian forces move in on 23 February, 2022.
  • Cybersecurity: Security teams use Command for threat detection and early indications and warnings of potential cyber security attacks. Teams can track malicious actors and cyber security news, in addition to geopolitical events. In some cases, this can provide hours of advanced notice versus traditional reporting. 
Amid warnings of an imminent Russian invasion on 23 February, 2022, a massive cyber attack hits Ukraine as analysts monitor the situation through the lens of Primer Command.
  • Financial risk: Fortune 1000 companies use Command today to track rapidly evolving geopolitical situations like in Ukraine and the potential risk that such events pose to a company’s business, supply chain, and its customers.
On 23 February 2022, Primer’s AI-generated situation reports captured and summarized the impact that the imminent conflict in Ukraine was having on global energy markets.
  • Brand and reputation management: Corporate communications, brand, and product teams use Command to listen and respond to public discourse around their company’s activities and products, as well as to counteract misinformation and disinformation.
Primer’s disputed information detection AI enables analysts to quickly identify information that contains potential fake news, propaganda, disputes, or contradictory narratives.

At Primer, we believe that Primer Command can not only help organizations to effectively respond to specific events, but also help them to protect our economy, our democracy, and our way of life by ensuring the safety and security of individuals, organizations, and societies. We’re excited to make this solution available to Primer customers and we look forward to seeing its positive impact on the world.


For a free Primer Command trial, click here.