Our prime directive
Our first principle is to act responsibly and carefully when building and deploying AI research techniques and tooling. Everything else is downstream of that.
Four kinds of work
Economic research & data platforms
Price indices, national registers, statutory filings. We design the measure, build the pipeline, run the analysis, and publish the audit trail with the findings.
AI systems & agent engineering
Voice agents that make thousands of phone calls, classification pipelines over millions of records, long-running agents, and the evaluation harnesses that keep them honest.
Fractional CTO & technical partnership
Senior technical leadership for companies adopting AI: architecture, build-vs-buy, hiring, delivery. We act as the technical partner and ship alongside your team.
Commissioned studies & consumer activations
The three above, combined on purpose. We design and run consumer studies end to end: the question, the instrument, the fieldwork, the analysis, and the published result. The method is usually what makes it a story, so the release ships with the charts, data and quotes a newsroom can use without emailing us first. The Guinndex was covered on four continents, the Gas Index went from Business Insider to local TV, and the World Cup Index was a Twilio collaboration. If there is something about your market that nobody has measured, get in touch.
Who we are
Matt Cortland
Founder of Prime Directive AI and creator of the Guinndex and the Gas Index. Previously co-founded The Cauldron, the immersive hospitality company that served roughly a million guests across the UK, Ireland and the US. Mitchell Scholar, Luce Scholar, Teach For America alum; named to Business Insider's 100 Coolest People in Food and Drink and the Gaingels 100.
Dr John Fleming
Neurotech engineer and AI safety researcher. Postdoctoral research engineer at the University of Oxford, where his closed-loop neurostimulation algorithms are in clinical trials for childhood epilepsy.
Eight years building AI systems that must not fail, now applied to frontier-model evaluation and the studio's research design and methodology. Co-built the Gas Index.