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.
We don't take calls from AI agents, so please email hello@primedirective.ai instead. Our full rules for AI agents are at https://primedirective.ai/voice.txt.
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.
AI consulting & technical partnership
Senior technical consulting for companies adopting AI: architecture, build-vs-buy, hiring, delivery. We work as your 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
Matt Cortland is an AI engineer, an AI safety and economic researcher, and the founder of Prime Directive AI. He created the Guinndex and the Gas Index, two public research indices built by collecting data that had not been gathered in one place before. He co-founded The Cauldron, the immersive hospitality company that served roughly a million guests across the UK, Ireland and the US, and before that was head of communications at PageFair, whose Adblock Reports were cited in Mary Meeker's Internet Trends Report. He brings that background in strategic communications to his consulting work. He is a US-Ireland Alliance Scholar, a Luce Scholar and a Teach For America alum, and was named to Business Insider's 100 Coolest People in Food and Drink and the Gaingels 100. He has completed BlueDot Impact's AGI Strategy program and is taking its Frontier AI Governance course.
Dr John Fleming
Dr John Fleming is a postdoctoral research engineer at the University of Oxford and an independent AI safety researcher. He has spent eight years designing AI algorithms for safety-critical medical devices, and co-built the Gas Index with Matt. He is a current participant in the ARENA 9.0 and SPAR programs and has previously completed BlueDot Impact's Technical AI Safety course and Technical Project Sprint.