3 Intelligence Products that Save Analysts Time
Dragonfly (part of FiscalNote)
Dragonfly is a geopolitical and security intelligence service for the world’s leading organisations.
As an analyst, security intelligence comes at you thick and fast. With limited resources and an abundance of information to sift through, you must be clear-eyed and intentional about how you use your time. Three products can help hone in on the risks that matter the most, says Strategic Intelligence Manager Matt Ince.
Please find his article below - we hope you find it useful. And if you would like to find out more about our Security Intelligence and Analysis Service (SIAS), which is designed to help analysts save significant time, please get in touch today. We would be delighted to arrange a one-to-one demo with our specialists.
Intelligence professionals are drowning in data.
On a daily basis, there's another conflict, another crisis, another event, all generating a constant stream of reports, alerts and information. Like Sisyphus, it can feel like you're pushing boulders up a hill only to have them roll right back down. There is simply no capacity to absorb every detail.
Add budget squeezes to the mix, and you get a situation where “slammed” and “buried” teams are spread too thin across too many needs. That's when you have to make the tough decisions: what risks do we focus on and which can we de-prioritise without jeopardising the safety of the company? What intelligence capabilities and services, and other sources of information do we invest in? What activities will add the most value? Because this is what time management really amounts to: being conscious of what you do, how you do it, and why.
So, how do you cut through the noise and get to what's important?
Here are three Dragonfly products to help you maximise the use of your time. Powerful alone but better together, they hone in on the most critical information and tell you when you need to pay attention.
1. All-source Intelligence Reports
?? The stuff you need to know, none of the fluff.
Acquiring data and information for its own sake is counterproductive. If the information happens to be clean, relevant and actionable, then you're in business. Everything else eats up your time, because someone has to go in and make sense of it all.
Two qualities separate truly valuable intelligence from the rest:
#1: It looks to the future.
The quest for real-time data is a big trend in our industry. But “real time” is the equivalent of standing under a broken pipe with water pouring on your head. When you step back and consider what decision you would make from the data that you are monitoring — changing travel plans, securing operations, moving people to safety — it becomes obvious that real-time is already too late.
What's actually needed is early warning — a way to look over the horizon and see what's coming before it arrives at your door.
Early warning intelligence saves time because it enables you to take possession of the future. Instead of responding whack-a-mole to headlines, alerts or panic situations — which cost precious time — you can consciously plan for plausible scenarios and calmly push the button on response plans as soon as a trigger event occurs.
#2: It connects the dots for you.
There is no way that 1,000 geopolitical events happening all over the world require your equal attention. Every organisation has a threshold for what is consequential to their business and locations. Curating your intelligence around that threshold enables you to be strategic and concentrate on information that's of maximum relevance to you.
Put these two qualities together, and you have intelligence reports that tell you:
This is exactly what the security intelligence reports in our Security Intelligence and Analysis Service (SIAS) platform cover. We publish around 80 in-depth analyses each month, focusing on business-critical geopolitical and security risks.
This structure means you see pertinent threats first along with the direction of travel. Instead of asking you to draw your own conclusions about what might happen and what the implications are for your business, our reports spell out, in plain English, what matters and why; and when you are likely to need to act.
By accessing intelligence that is already business-critical, curated, future-looking and actionable, you save significant time, you will have more bandwidth to focus on more strategic tasks within your organisation such as briefing your senior stakeholders face-to-face and tailoring the intelligence to suit your internal requirements.
2. Copilot AI Assistant
?? Accurate, relevant answers you can use straight away.
While intelligence reports provide the comprehensive picture, sometimes you need a quick answer to a specific question. The promise of AI is a strong draw in this regard, as security teams look for ways to parse the libraries of data. But as an industry, we’re AI skeptics. Anyone who has ever used an AI chatbot knows they hallucinate misleading answers — potentially compounding uncertainty.
But what if the opposite were true?
Our new AI assistant, FiscalNote Copilot for Global Intelligence, is built by intelligence professionals for intelligence professionals. From a usability perspective, it looks like an everyday chatbox. You type in an open-ended question on any geopolitical, macroeconomic or security issue (“What are the key drivers of instability in Eastern Europe?”, “What are the prospects of the war in Ukraine ending in 2025?” “What are the options for travelling from Poland to Kyiv?" ) and get an instant response.
Copilot doesn't give you 100 answers but one good answer. Compared to manually sifting through multiple sources, and pulling everything together, Copilot is hours and weeks faster. You can even copy and paste questions posed by your internal stakeholders and get back to them with a precise, relevant answer, thus proving your value.
But it's the accuracy of the answers that sets this tool apart.
Copilot is fed by the latest data and reports from the FiscalNote Global Intelligence companies — Dragonfly, FrontierView and Oxford Analytica. All the answers come from this trusted, reliable source.
Provenance provides another layer of time efficiency. The credibility of the answers you get from Copilot means you can use them straight away, without all the cross-checking, verification and audit that's needed when you use public domain AI. Links to the original analyses come up in the answers as well, so you can go back to the source when you need to and read more in-depth analysis, if you require more.
We know that trust saves time. When there is trust in the information, you spend less time fact-checking and more time thinking through the implications for your company and internal stakeholders - in other words, adding value - based on what the information is telling you.
3. Access to Analysts
?? Save time by going straight to the experts.
Access to the brains behind the intelligence assessments is a rare commodity, but it's essential to have. No amount of AI can replace human intelligence from the mouths of experts. Getting on the phone with a Dragonfly analyst is the ultimate time-saver because it gives you the opportunity to ask questions about the geopolitical issues that concern you most, go deeper on critical insights, and get direct and precise support on issues that are critical to your business.
The information you’ve been struggling to make sense of can suddenly fall into place when you speak to the person with deep sector or regional expertise.
Client-analyst engagement matters because intelligence is fundamentally a collective exercise. The conversations we have with in-house intelligence teams and leading global business minds are integral to our intelligence cycle — they provide valuable cross-sector insights that we can share with our clients, and they also help shape our research. Learning what analysts and decision-makers are really worried about helps us create the most targeted, actionable intelligence available. This adds yet another level of confidence in the intelligence you're receiving.
Ultimately, we want our clients to maximise the use of our work and get the highest possible returns on their intelligence investment. The availability of our experts to our SIAS clients — free from barriers and middlemen — is another way we ensure that happens.
Make time for the work that matters most
There's no single silver bullet when it comes to saving time in risk intelligence. Anyone who claims there is, beware. Intelligence is too layered, and the world is too volatile, to rely on a single source or solution.
What does make a difference? Thinking consciously about the decisions your intelligence is supporting, reducing the distractions of irrelevant information and low-value intelligence, and building your intelligence preparation on the back of relevant, actionable, trustworthy research.
The three tools we've discussed here — future-looking, actionable intelligence reports; a Copilot; and direct access to analysts — are parts of that system, which makes up the Security Intelligence and Analysis Service (SIAS). With relatively little effort, and no changes to your workflow, they free up your time — maybe hours of your week — to focus on the work that matters most.
>>>>> Start your 7-day, complimentary trial of our Copilot here: www.fiscalnote.com/copilot/global-intelligence#demo
>>>>> To find out more about the Security Intelligence and Analysis Service (SIAS), which includes direct access to our analysts, and to schedule a one-to-one demo, please get in touch with our specialists today: www.pages.fiscalnote.com/Dragonfly-Dispatch
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About Dragonfly: Dragonfly is a geopolitical and security intelligence service for the world’s leading organisations. From the highest-risk environments to the boardroom, Dragonfly enables its clients to make confident decisions and puts them ahead of risks to achieve their goals. We craft intelligence that is all-source, corroborated, analysed, filtered and vividly presented to give our clients the confidence to advance their agendas, plan with precision and sustain their competitive advantage.
Find out more here: www.dragonflyintelligence.com
Get in touch: www.dragonflyintelligence.com/contact