SCOUT AI Revolutionizes Security Intelligence with Amazon OpenSearch Service

MAX Security provides clients with world-class intelligence to help assess potential disruptions to business continuity. Whether for travel, market expansion, or due diligence, the security and geopolitical reports offered by MAX Security delivers actionable insights amid market uncertainty.

Manually generating reports of this caliber for a specific research question could take an analyst up to 6 hours for simple cases and up to 12 hours for more complex cases, making each report a high-investment, high-value item. The substantial cost of manual report building highlights two significant challenges for analysts and their teams:

1.      Operational inefficiency: Analysts spent considerable time combing through vetted information for insights, increasing operational overhead and slowing decision-making.

2.      Limited scalability: Analyst teams had finite resources dedicated to research, meaning they are only scratching the surface of the extensive MAX Security intel database.

Recognizing the high production costs, MAX Security saw an opportunity to enhance its offerings by implementing a solution that enables analysts to produce a larger number of reports at a faster rate. To achieve this, MAX Security turned to BigData Boutique for support.

Having already worked together on a successful database modernization project, MAX Security was confident in BigData Boutique’s capacity to construct and implement an improved search function for their archival database. They partnered to build a powerful cross-functional tool that streamlines workflows by shortening the distance between the inquiring user and the information they seek. With this fast hybrid search, MAX Security has created a conducive system for its security clients to build trust in using an AI tool.

In roughly 14 months, BigData Boutique and Max Security developed MAX SCOUT AI, an agent that helps accelerate decision-making, reduces research overhead, boosts overall productivity across the organization, and frees the security team to focus on higher-value priorities. More granularly, SCOUT AI enables users to:

·       Query pre-vetted security intelligence using natural language

·       Plan and run queries to answer questions from multiple angles for a holistic view

·       Retrieve specific, in-depth answers based solely on MAX’s proprietary database

·       Generate real-time summaries, maps, and visualizations to support threat analysis

·       Save an average of 7 hours of research

Unlike generic AI retrieval systems, SCOUT AI was engineered specifically around MAX Security’s proprietary intelligence ecosystem. The platform processes multiple document types through AI-driven custom chunking and Cohere embeddings to ensure nuanced semantic understanding across diverse data sources. A sophisticated GenAI router and planner that is aware of chat history, dynamically orchestrates multiple analytical tools to address each query, combining document retrieval, geographic intelligence, and route analysis as needed. This intelligence layer is powered by a robust AWS foundation leveraging Amazon Bedrock, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), and AWS Lambda for scalable, monitored, and reliable performance.

Native LLM integrations within Bedrock provided access to advanced AI models, including Cohere embeddings for semantic search, and Anthropic LLMs for dynamic content generation. AWS Lambda streamlined ETL procedures — efficiently processing and embedding reports for indexing in OpenSearch, while Amazon ECS hosted the scalable and fault-tolerant agent application, ensuring reliability under load. CloudWatch enabled real-time monitoring of service health, usage patterns, and AI model consumption.

To measure the effectiveness of SCOUT AI’s implementation, the BigData Boutique team conducted both quantitative and qualitative evaluations to ensure SCOUT AI was intuitive, easy to use, and able to provide data in a clear and helpful way. To do this, they collaborated closely with the MAX Security analyst team. Together, they manually assessed the quality of responses, benchmarked against curated question sets, and built a user-driven feedback mechanism (answer voting) to improve performance based on continuous real-world client inputs.

According to Liza Katz, BigData Boutique’s GenAI Team Lead: “One of the key technical achievements in this project is our application of deep analytics to improve the quality of the tool’s responses. Text alone is not always the best way to present insights, so we enabled the agent to also provide users with complementary visualizations. For example, if a user wants to know the safest route between point A and point B, the tool will present a clear map with precise, explanatory information.”

Instead of diverting time and resources to respond to every inquiry or request, SCOUT AI enables employees to access the information and insights they need independently. Throughout the project, careful attention was given to cost optimization — with strategies like selecting cost-effective AI models for each task, minimizing token usage, and refining OpenSearch retention policies — ensuring a balance between performance and operational efficiency. SCOUT AI has made an immediate and transformative impact on MAX Security’s client offerings, with numerous positive results, including:

-          Faster access to trusted intelligence. SCOUT AI reduced the average time to produce a decision-ready briefing from 2 hours to 25 minutes. Clients’ analysts can now quickly retrieve trusted, actionable information without the time-consuming manual search or reliance on analysts from another team. Organizations also reported reducing research workloads [1] by 7 hours per week, per analyst.

-          Higher quality insights. SCOUT AI’s responses are built strictly on MAX’s trusted intelligence, ensuring accuracy, consistency, reliability, and no hallucinations. During post-implementation measurement, over 42% of SCOUT AI outputs were rated as “highly relevant” by analysts, and overall, consistently provided trusted regional and situational context that informed ongoing analysis and supported faster, more confident workflows.

-          Search democratization. SCOUT AI makes MAX Security’s intelligence more accessible to an expanding pool of data consumers, including companies with tighter budgets, smaller teams, senior managers, and EP teams, without requiring additional resourcing input.

-          Increased client satisfaction. MAX Security has received overwhelmingly positive early feedback from clients, highlighting the tool’s value in improving daily workflows and decision-making speed.

-          Improved operational cost efficiency. SCOUT AI’s intelligent resource management and scalable cloud architecture ensure that the solution remains sustainable and cost-effective as adoption grows. Intelligence teams reported a 25% improvement in efficiency when using SCOUT AI compared to manual research.

MAX SCOUT AI has revolutionized AI for customers needing trusted and vetted data. Trained in a closed system of MAX Security’s archive, researchers and security teams can rest assured that the output is accurate and use their valuable time researching other high-value topics outside of MAX Security’s database. Their future plans include continuing to iterate and innovate to develop new search features that support their clients’ business needs.