Fivecast’s suite of tools, supported by Google Cloud delivers a 400% ROI for intelligence analysts
Significantly improves Fivecast’s risk assessment quality and efficiency in threat detection and mitigation for its customers
Accelerated product development with Google Code Assist
Fivecast, a leading provider of open-source intelligence (OSINT) solutions, partnered with Google Cloud to enhance its capabilities in AI-driven threat detection, risk assessment, and operational efficiency. This collaboration has significantly improved the performance of their AI models and accelerated product development.
Fivecast, a leading provider of open-source intelligence (OSINT) solutions, partnered with Google Cloud to enhance its capabilities in AI-driven threat detection, risk assessment, and operational efficiency. This collaboration has significantly improved the performance of their AI models and accelerated product development.
Fivecast's journey to Google Cloud success
Fivecast faced substantial technical challenges before implementing Google Cloud. Technically, the company needed best-of-breed AI for image classification, translation, and Optical Character Recognition (OCR), ideally with easy integration and scalability. Managing AI hallucinations (false positives) was also critical for accurate risk analysis.
Business-wise, privacy compliance (GDPR) and ethical AI principles were non-negotiable. Fivecast’s government, commercial security, and financial institution customers demanded highly performant models with "very low tolerance" for false positives or negatives, making robust security and compliance essential. The fundamental "buy vs. build" decision for AI features led the company to seek superior third-party solutions.
Fivecast selected Google Cloud due to its superior AI performance in LLM models and tooling, enabling it to integrate "best of breed AI" swiftly. The platform’s ease of integration was also crucial for Fivecast’s cloud-first approach. Google Cloud met the stringent security and compliance needs of the company’s government and financial clients. Moreover, the platform's scalability effectively managed high-volume generative AI demands.
We selected Google Cloud because of its superior AI performance, especially in image classification, translation, and generative AI. We like to select the best of breed, not reinvent the wheel, so that our development team can focus on solving open-source intelligence challenges.
David Blockow
VP of Engineering and Co-founder, Fivecast
Google's proactive partnership and support, including help navigating AI guardrails for sensitive content, was fundamental. Google Cloud also significantly reduced Fivecast's costs for generative AI services, thereby enabling the company to offer features as standard rather than premium add-ons. Furthermore, Google Cloud's continuous advancements in Gemini models significantly reduced AI hallucinations, a key concern. This, combined with comprehensive, built-in compliance and security aligning with Fivecast's ethical AI principles, distinguished Google Cloud from competitors.
Fivecast's Deep AI Integration with Google Cloud
Being able to work with the team at Google to cost-effectively leverage generative AI models within an ethical AI framework has been fundamental to our success.
Jason Signolet
Director of Data Science, Fivecast
Fivecast has significantly deepened its integration with Google Cloud, moving beyond initial self-service API access to a more mature environment with Google's support. This involved establishing foundational elements like project structure, environment segregation, identity and access management, and networking within the platform.
Currently, Fivecast significantly extends its use of AI services, leveraging Google Cloud products to enhance its capabilities. This includes deploying bespoke models built and fine-tuned within Vertex AI, indicating a deeper, more customized application of AI beyond off-the-shelf solutions.
Fivecast is also actively adopting generative AI, particularly Gemini, across various workflows. This integration spans multiple critical areas:
- Product features: Generative AI is directly incorporated into product features to contribute to risk assessments for their customers.
- Internal processes: Google Code Assist is being used to accelerate prototyping for new application features, software development, and testing by providing LLM-driven coding support to their developers.
- Model evaluations: The company employs generative AI to conduct automated evaluations of both new generative AI models and other AI features it develops, providing a robust internal framework for quality assurance.
A significant benefit of this close collaboration with Google has been the ability to work directly with Google teams to navigate AI guardrails. This is crucial for Fivecast's OSINT work, where analyzing sensitive "objectionable material" (such as racist content, markers of radicalization) is essential. The flexibility to adjust these guardrails ensures that Fivecast’s tools can perform comprehensive analysis without refusal, which is "fundamental" to their operational needs. This level of partnership and adaptability from Google Cloud has enabled Fivecast to effectively utilize advanced AI in a highly sensitive domain.
Additionally, Fivecast leverages Google SDKs for application development and is exploring the new Agent Development Kit and agent-to-agent protocols for future use cases. Looking ahead, Fivecast is keen on leveraging agent-based workloads to automate more manual processes for analysts while maintaining human oversight and compliance.
Fivecast empowers organizations to navigate complex risk environments and uncover critical threats in real-time. The company’s innovative solutions combine AI-driven risk analytics and advanced open-source intelligence (OSINT) to deliver actionable insights, enhancing security and facilitating effective investigations.
Industry: Technology
Location: Australia
Products: Google Cloud, Vertex AI, Gemini, Generative AI, Google Code Assist
