As the third quarter of the year came to a close, our team noticed a significant trend: a sharp increase in the frequency and detail of security reviews and contract revisions specifically referencing Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies. This is a conversation happening in boardrooms, IT/security teams, and legal departments across the country – and rightly so. The rapid evolution of AI presents both incredible opportunities and substantial risks
Today, we are taking a moment to memorialize IMPLAN’s position and strategy on AI. AI is a topic we approach with both enthusiasm for its potential and a deep-seated commitment to the principles of security, transparency, and tangible value.
AI will fundamentally change how everyone works. In fact, it already has. Like many of you, we have already integrated AI into our daily operations to enhance efficiency and improve the customer experience. This is not a future-tense hypothetical; it’s a present-day reality.
Our support bot, SAM, is a prime example. SAM is available 24/7/365 to answer questions, and it responds to a significant portion of our technical support inquiries. We trained SAM on our extensive knowledge base, which comprises over 5,000 pages of detailed documentation on our data, methodologies, and platform features. This application of AI serves a dual purpose: it provides our clients with immediate answers at any time of day, while enabling our customer success team to focus on the most complex, nuanced challenges our users face. This allows them to move beyond simple troubleshooting and build deeper, more valuable relationships with our clients.
Similarly, our marketing website now features an AI-powered chatbot designed to provide instant answers to common pre-sales questions, guiding prospective clients to the information they need, day or night.
Internally, our teams leverage a suite of approved AI tools to enhance quality control and coaching for customer calls, accelerate market research, and assist in drafting content (including assistance on this article).
AI’s benefits must be tempered with a commitment to security and governance. From day one, our approach has been defined by a security-first mindset. We recognized that the primary risk of leveraging AI, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), was the potential for confidential data (both our clients’ and our own) to be absorbed into the training datasets of public models. This is an unacceptable risk.
To mitigate this, we established a formal, comprehensive AI policy that governs our internal and external use of these technologies. This is an operational framework that allows us to innovate responsibly. The policy categorizes different types of work and data, assigning strict access controls to anything deemed proprietary or confidential. It maintains a curated list of approved AI tools that have been vetted by our security and legal teams, and it outlines a clear process for evaluating and onboarding any new tools.
This governance structure allows us to harness the efficiency gains of AI while ensuring we have a complete understanding of what our AI vendors can and cannot do with the inputs and outputs generated. It is our commitment to you that our pursuit of innovation will never come at the expense of your data’s integrity and privacy.
In an era of technological hype cycles, it can be tempting to rebrand existing technologies with the latest buzzword. We have made a conscious, strategic decision not to engage in "AI-washing." Our focus remains steadfast: to deliver the best, most reliable economic analytics software to our customers. Simply labeling a feature "AI" does not inherently make it better, more accurate, or more valuable. As stewards of your trust, we believe in radical transparency over marketing trends.
IMPLAN’s core value proposition is built on a foundation of proven, defensible, and transparent methodologies. Our underlying dataset is the product of a mature, automated data pipeline employing well-documented and replicable harmonization techniques, all overseen by extensive human checks and balances.
Our core economic models are predictive, but they are based on well-studied, credible, and deterministic mathematical algorithms from the field of input-output economics.
Our reporting engine uses established data presentation techniques to generate executive-level reports in a variety of formats.
We recognize and are proud of the fact that these core components are not AI or Machine Learning (ML) models. They are complex. They are difficult to implement at scale. They are proven. Because they are not AI, we will not call them that. Your strategic decisions depend on the reliability and auditability of our platform, and that trust is paramount.
While we refuse to AI-wash our existing technology, we are actively developing new, high-value features that leverage AI in a secure and enterprise-grade manner. Our product AI efforts are focused exclusively on enhancements that provide clear, demonstrable benefits to your workflow.
Here is a glimpse of what is coming in the short term:
To power these features, our engineering team has architected a secure, isolated, and private environment. We have built our AI architecture on AWS Bedrock, a platform that provides us with deep, granular control over foundational models. This choice was deliberate. AWS Bedrock ensures that none of our customers' data or prompts can ever be used for training the underlying models. It allows us to minimize the risk of "hallucinations" or inaccurate outputs, scale performance reliably, and incorporate new LLM versions in a controlled, deliberate manner.
This architecture ensures that all of our existing security policies, processes, and controls apply to our new AI features. Finally, and crucially, we believe in customer choice. All AI-powered features will be fully opt-in/opt-out, giving your organization complete control over whether AI algorithms are used within your IMPLAN subscriptions.
Our journey with AI is one of thoughtful application, not blind adoption. We are committed to leveraging this powerful technology to enhance your work, all while upholding the highest standards of security, transparency, and trust you have come to expect from IMPLAN.
If you have any questions on our AI architecture, supported features, or security, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager, support (support@implan.com), sales (sales@implan.com), or myself directly.