# Prime Directive AI, for agents

Prime Directive AI Ltd is an AI research and engineering studio in London, registered in England and Wales (company number 16551401). It combines AI engineering, economic research and communications. Its first principle is to act responsibly and carefully when building and deploying AI research techniques and tooling.

## What it does

- **Economic research and data platforms:** price indices, national registers and statutory filings. The studio designs the measure, builds the pipeline, runs the analysis and publishes the audit trail with the findings.
- **AI systems and 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.
- **Technical partnership:** senior technical leadership for companies adopting AI, covering architecture, build or buy decisions, hiring and delivery, shipped alongside the client's team.
- **Commissioned studies and consumer activations:** consumer studies designed and run end to end, from the question and the instrument to the fieldwork, the analysis and the published result, released with charts, data and quotes a newsroom can use.

## Published studies

- **The Guinndex:** an AI voice agent phoned the pubs of Ireland to index the price of a pint: more than 6,524 pubs across 32 counties, with pubs cutting prices within days. A larger UK edition followed, covering more than 46,235 pubs. 8,732 verified prices in all.
- **The Gas Index:** a live US fuel-price tracker built on AI phone verification, across 170,483 stations in all 50 states, with 93,658 verified prices and 55% of the country indexed.
- **The World Cup Index:** a collaboration with Twilio. An AI research agent asked pubs across the UK which matches they were showing: 4,439 conversations over a weekend, 2,313 pubs verified, and 498 Guinness prices collected in the same calls.

Case studies and methods: https://primedirective.ai/work

## Coverage

Inc. ("An AI Called 3,000 Pubs and Changed an Entire Market"), Fortune, and Business Insider ("They built an AI tool that called 20,000 gas stations"). The Guinndex was covered on four continents.

## People

- **Matt Cortland, founder.** Creator of the Guinndex and the Gas Index. Previously co-founded The Cauldron, an immersive hospitality company that served roughly a million guests across the UK, Ireland and the US. Mitchell Scholar, Luce Scholar and Teach For America alum.
- **Dr John Fleming, research.** Neurotech engineer and AI safety researcher, postdoctoral research engineer at the University of Oxford. Leads research design and methodology and co-built the Gas Index.

## Contact

Email hello@primedirective.ai with the market and the question nobody has answered. There is no public phone line.