Guess the AI bubble for defense hasn’t popped quite yet. This week, a new company (well, Public Benefit Corporation) called Lancea.AI emerged from stealth, promising to use AI to drive effective strategic communication—especially in high-pressure situations, like intelligence and national security.
According to Lancea co-founder Greg Young, the company’s software is built for “adaptive influence.” Basically, ChatGPT but for super-secret defense and spy stuff.
“It is a human-in-the-loop platform that combines expert tradecraft with an orchestrated ecosystem of AI agents to help strategic communicators move from intelligence to action in minutes, not months,” he told Tectonic via email.
Put simply: When you need to assess intelligence and kick off influence campaigns quickly, and in a crowded information space, Young says that Lancea is your guy/gal.
The slightly creepy era of AI-powered intelligence continues apace.
Brains in a box: We’ve covered similar AI-powered intelligence and influence tools before (remember Danti and Rhombus Power?), but Young says what sets Lancea apart is the speed at which their tool operates, and the experienced team that built it.
“Falsehoods travel faster than facts, and the traditional ‘consultant’ model, which takes weeks or months to develop a strategy, is too slow for the modern OODA loop,” he said. The team has a deep background in “influence analysis, counter disinformation strategy, and intelligence”—a collective 45 years of experience, according to Young.
Here’s how it works:
- Lancea allows AI agents to work alongside intelligence agents to craft influence narratives. “The output is a comprehensive, actionable strategic communications package, not just an email or a social post,” Young said.
- The bots’ package includes “audience profiles, decision journey mapping, ‘red-teamed’ risk assessments, message variations tailored to specific segments, and the tactical assets (content, narratives, visual concepts) needed to execute that strategy immediately.”
- Young was careful to highlight that Lancea is built to work with human intelligence teams, not replace them. “The human sits at the informed center of every suggestion our AI agents make … we act as an accelerator for teams with more demand than supply of strategic communications expertise.”
- Think of it as ChatGPT, but for high-stakes, secure environments. “While the core ‘brains in a box’ are pre-loaded, the system is designed to ingest and analyze specific context securely,” he added. “We ensure sensitive data is handled with the appropriate protocols.”
“This tool will give you the executive summary document and risk analysis, the 60-page in-depth comms plan, and the hundreds of pages of suggested multi-channel content. It’s everything you need to go beyond analyzing the threat and start addressing it,” Young said.
He added that Lancea adheres to “strict NIST standards and is preparing for SOC2 and FedRAMP readiness to support our public sector partners.”
Fill it in: Lancea fills two critical gaps in the national security and intelligence communities, Young said. First, it bridges the gulf between traditional LLMs and the public sector. Second, it gives people a clear plan of action to use after receiving critical intelligence analysis.
“We also provide the answer to the ‘so what?’ question leaders face after having already paid a premium for quality analysis,” he said. “Generic tools can write, but they don’t understand strategy, risk, or tradecraft. Traditional firms understand strategy, but they take weeks and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for a plan.”
Lancea is basically like if the two had a baby—expertise balanced with speed. Young said that the software enables “teams to do in one hour what typically takes a month of consulting work.”
Out of curiosity—what do we think a den of AI spies looks like?