Babel Street has launched Insights Investigator, a new agentic capability that puts tradecraft-trained AI agents at the front edge of investigative work while ensuring analysts remain in control of scope, logic, and outcomes of their missions. As part of the Babel Street Insights platform, Investigator represents a shift from search and AI-assisted queries to analyst-directed, AI-executed investigations.
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 industrial scale. When adversaries use AI to attack, defenders relying on manual investigation are outpaced before the first query runs.
“Adversaries are already running AI-powered campaigns at a scale no manual workflow can match. The organizations we serve must keep pace, and the best analysts in the world should not be spending their time chasing data,” said Benji Hutchinson, CEO at Babel Street. “Insights Investigator puts analyst-controlled agents on the other side of that equation, grounded in a decade of mission data and tradecraft, so analysts can focus on delivering decision-ready intelligence.”
Built for high-stakes environments, Insights Investigator enables analysts to state intent in natural language and have AI agents carry out the approved investigation. Fueled by Babel Street’s Data Dominance™, rights-cleared, mission-curated, multilingual data foundation with agentic-ready proprietary enrichment pipelines, Investigator grounds every workflow in trusted data, transparent reasoning, and traceable evidence. The result is faster investigation without sacrificing auditability, sourcing discipline, or human control.
Early users report cutting research time by more than 50 percent, with individual analysts saving hours each week and teams reclaiming days of collection across active investigations.
“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,” said Brian Fuller, Executive Director, Office of Strategic Initiatives and Center for Intelligence Research, Analysis, and Training (CIRAT) at Mercyhurst University. “When you are tracking illicit financial networks or monitoring fast-moving threat indicators, that kind of compression changes what’s possible.”
Insights Investigator is modeled after the elite tradecraft, workflows, and experience of real-world operators. Notable features of this Investigator release include:
- Rights-cleared data dominance: Investigator puts Babel Street’s agentic-ready, mission-curated data estate to work across 200-plus languages and the formats adversaries actually use. New Entity Extraction structures data at ingestion, improving search precision and enabling more consistent, evidence-backed analysis.
- Analyst-directed AI agents: Analysts define the objective, review the plan, and retain control over scope, logic, and outcomes. Investigator agents are trained in Babel Street’s tradecraft, mission expertise, and investigative workflows to execute multi-step investigations, not simply return AI-generated answers. Unlike black-box AI systems, Investigator exposes the research plan, query logic, and reasoning.
- Trust, governance, and auditability: Investigator is designed for regulated and high-stakes environments with audit trails, human-controlled gates, transparent reasoning, and Challenge Agents that help test outputs before decisions are made.
- Mission ready at its core: Shaped by a decade of serving the Intelligence and Defense communities and modeled on how experienced analysts conduct real investigations.
This release is part of Babel Street’s broader roadmap to embed 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.
This continued expansion will start 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 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.
“The next era of risk intelligence will not be defined by chatbots that answer questions. It will be defined by AI agents that help run investigations at machine speed — grounded in trusted data, governed by analysts, and built to produce intelligence people can stand behind,” said John Larson, President and Chief AI Officer at Babel Street.
“Adversaries are already using AI to move faster than human workflows can respond. Insights Investigator puts analyst-directed agents in the hands of operators to counter these threats and sets a new standard for Agentic Risk Intelligence,” Larson concluded.
