AI-Led Executive Protection: A Modern Security Playbook

Targeted threats against leadership teams don’t start at the motorcade. They start weeks earlier—on social media, fringe forums, paste sites, data broker listings, breached credential dumps, and in the “helpful” location breadcrumbs executives and families accidentally leave behind.

Most companies still treat executive protection as a travel add-on: book the car service, add a close-protection detail for the event, and hope nothing changes. That’s a brittle plan. The stronger approach looks a lot more like modern cyber defense—continuous monitoring, prioritized intelligence requirements, rapid triage, and a response playbook that assumes conditions will change.

Recorded Future recently shared how its own Security and Safety team protects company leadership using intelligence-led operations. It’s a useful case study for anyone responsible for executive security, protective intelligence, or the growing overlap between physical security and AI-driven cybersecurity—especially in defense and national security environments where leaders are high-value targets and the pace of threats is relentless.

Executive protection now looks like cybersecurity (for a reason)

Executive protection works best when it’s treated as a threat intelligence problem, not a bodyguarding problem. The same logic that protects a network—identify threats early, validate credibility, reduce exposure, and respond fast—also protects people.

In practice, that means:

• Preventing threats through early detection and deterrence, rather than reacting after a threat is already public or imminent
• Connecting signals across domains (online sentiment, OSINT chatter, physical crime patterns, protest activity, emergency response constraints)
• Operating continuously, not just around travel days

Here’s the stance I’ve seen pay off: If your executive protection program isn’t intelligence-led, it’s mostly logistics. Logistics matter, but they don’t stop a determined actor who’s done reconnaissance.

In the Recorded Future example, their Director of Security and Safety, Brian Solecki—drawing on military and protective service experience—frames threat intelligence as the cornerstone. That’s consistent with what’s happening across government and critical infrastructure: protective teams are increasingly built around collection → analysis → action, not presence → reaction.

Why AI matters in this shift

The uncomfortable truth is that the volume of relevant signals is now too large for humans alone:

• Thousands of posts and replies across platforms
• Deepfake or synthetic media that can inflame narratives quickly
• Data broker and people-search listings that expose home addresses and family connections
• Real-time disruptions (traffic chokepoints, police activity, power outages) that can invalidate a route plan instantly

AI doesn’t replace judgment here. It automates the boring parts—collection, enrichment, clustering, anomaly detection—so skilled analysts can focus on credibility, intent, and response.

Start with Priority Intelligence Requirements (PIRs), not panic

The fastest way to waste money in executive protection is to “monitor everything.” You’ll drown in noise, your analysts will burn out, and real threats will blend in.

The Recorded Future team starts by crafting Priority Intelligence Requirements (PIRs)—the same discipline used in defense and national security intelligence cycles.

A strong PIR-driven program answers:

• Who are we protecting (executives and immediate family, assistants, travel planners)?
• What do we need early warning on (doxxing, credible threats, surveillance indicators, impersonation, protest coordination, insider risk)?
• Where are the likely threat surfaces (social platforms, niche forums, local event chatter, public records, dark web marketplaces)?
• When do we escalate (thresholds tied to specificity, capability, proximity, and history)?

Practical PIR examples you can copy

If you’re building (or fixing) an executive protection program, these PIRs usually earn their keep:

1. Event lead-up threats: references to the executive, venue, time, route, or security posture within 14 days of travel.
2. Doxxing and address exposure: new posts or listings linking the executive or family members to home, school, or routine locations.
3. Impersonation and synthetic media: fake videos, spoof accounts, or “leaked” statements likely to trigger harassment or targeted action.
4. Local disruption signals: protest permits, road closures, emergency incidents, or known violence hotspots near planned movements.

PIRs are also where AI becomes practical: models can prioritize signals that match your PIR patterns and suppress the rest.

Intelligence-led trip planning: treat every itinerary like an operation

Good executive protection planning isn’t just “secure car + secure hotel.” It’s a pre-event risk picture built from multiple streams.

Solecki’s team describes monitoring:

• Police, fire, and emergency management coverage (including response times)
• Lodging, restaurants, event venues
• Transportation options (car services, ride share, mass transit)
• Traffic chokepoints and route constraints
• Threat actors, protest activity, and local crime statistics

That’s the right scope, but the differentiator is how you operationalize it. The best teams turn intelligence into decision support, like:

• Route confidence scores (primary vs. alternate routes based on disruption probability)
• Venue risk ratings (access control realities, protest adjacency, evacuation routes)
• Time-window guidance (when to move to avoid predictable crowds)

Real-time updates are the point (not the perk)

Static plans fail because the environment moves. A route that was safe at 3:00 PM can be unusable at 3:20 PM due to police activity, a traffic collision, or a nearby incident.

Recorded Future’s team relies on real-time updates to make quick changes—moving to a safe area, sheltering in place, or returning to secure lodging. That’s the protective equivalent of a SOC pivoting from “monitor” to “contain” when an intrusion hits.

They shared a concrete example from the Munich Security Conference earlier this year: threat intelligence alerted their security team about a potential disturbance near the venue, enabling rapid assessment and route/venue adjustments.

The deeper lesson: Protective intelligence is only valuable if it changes a decision. If alerts don’t drive action, you don’t have intelligence—you have notifications.

Continuous executive monitoring: where digital risk becomes physical risk

Executive and family digital footprints are now part of the threat surface. This is where the AI-in-cybersecurity angle becomes unavoidable.

Recorded Future uses watch lists for ongoing monitoring, surfacing:

• Fake news videos and derogatory mentions
• Environmental hazards impacting residences (they cite wildfires as an example)

The important connection is escalation: online hostility can transform into real-world risk when adversaries collect identifying information, map routines, and choose a moment of vulnerability.

Escalation indicators that matter

If you want a clean, actionable model for analysts, train your team to separate:

• Venting (general dislike, non-specific hostility)
• Fixation (repeated mentions, obsessive framing, “research” behavior)
• Targeting (specifics about time/place, travel, family, routes)
• Operational intent (weapons talk, coordination, surveillance, “how to” queries)

Solecki highlights exactly the kinds of escalation indicators that should trigger action:

• Specific references to where and when an executive will appear
• Family members and associates being named
• Transportation modes and predictable patterns of life

This is also where AI helps in very specific ways:

• Entity resolution to connect aliases to real identities across platforms
• Link analysis to map communities amplifying threats
• Natural language classification to distinguish harassment from credible intent
• Computer vision to spot re-used images or synthetic media patterns in impersonation campaigns

But don’t over-automate the final decision. When someone’s safety is on the line, human review is a feature, not a bottleneck.

Alert response: use a credibility framework, not gut instinct

When alerts arrive, teams need a consistent method to assess credibility and decide what protective posture to adopt.

Recorded Future routes intelligence through an evaluation process (including managed monitoring) to determine whether threat actors have both:

• Motivation (ideology, grievance, fixation, explicit intent)
• Means (capability, access, proximity, prior behavior)

That’s the right backbone. To make it operational, many organizations add:

• Specificity: Does the threat include time/place/method details?
• Immediacy: Is there a near-term window of concern?
• Corroboration: Are there multiple independent signals?
• History: Has the actor escalated before?

What “response” should look like

Once credibility crosses a threshold, response should be pre-authorized and fast. Recorded Future describes actions such as:

• Enhanced security posture
• Law enforcement notification/support
• Alternate work or residential locations
• Deviating from or cancelling itineraries

If you’re trying to mature your program, document these as tiers with clear owners and timelines. Example:

1. Tier 1 (Monitor): increased collection, confirm identities, notify protective lead
2. Tier 2 (Harden): adjust routes/venues, tighten access control, brief the executive team
3. Tier 3 (Disrupt): law enforcement engagement, trip cancellation, temporary relocation

The biggest failure mode I see is indecision. A slow “maybe” response is often worse than a firm “we’re changing the plan now.”

Measuring success: the metric is what doesn’t happen (and that’s tricky)

Solecki’s line is blunt and accurate:

“Ultimately, our success is determined by what didn’t happen.”

That creates a measurement problem. If you do your job well, there’s no incident to point to.

You can still measure program effectiveness with leading indicators, such as:

• Mean time to triage (MTTT): time from alert to credibility decision
• Mean time to mitigate (MTTM): time from decision to protective action
• False positive rate by PIR: which requirements generate noise
• Exposure reduction: number of public records/data broker removals completed for protectees
• Route/venue changes driven by intelligence: decisions influenced by validated signals

These metrics matter for budget conversations because they translate “security intuition” into operational performance.

Where executive protection is heading in 2026: targeted attacks and AI-enabled tracking

The trend line isn’t subtle: targeted harassment and threats are increasingly crossing from online to offline. Solecki points to high-profile incidents that embolden attackers to act physically, not just post.

Two forces are accelerating that shift:

1. Polarization and grievance ecosystems that amplify narratives and direct attention to specific individuals
2. AI-enabled tracking and data enrichment that make it easier to find addresses, routines, and family connections

This is exactly why this topic belongs in an “AI in Defense & National Security” series. The same AI and OSINT capabilities used for strategic intelligence can also be weaponized for targeting. Security teams need to assume adversaries can do decent collection and analysis—often with automation—and build protective intelligence accordingly.

A stance worth adopting: Executive protection is now a fusion discipline. Physical security, cybersecurity, intelligence analysis, and brand/digital risk teams need a shared operating picture.

A practical next step: build a fused protective intelligence loop

If you’re responsible for executive risk—whether in a commercial enterprise, a defense-adjacent contractor, or a public sector agency—start with a simple operating loop and refine it:

1. Define PIRs tied to real decisions (travel, events, residence protection, comms posture)
2. Instrument collection across OSINT, dark web, brand impersonation, and local disruption feeds
3. Apply AI for prioritization (clustering, entity resolution, severity scoring)
4. Run a credibility framework based on motivation + means + specificity
5. Execute tiered response actions with pre-approved escalation paths
6. Review weekly: what triggered action, what was noise, what exposure can be reduced

If your current process can’t support this loop, the gap isn’t “more guards.” It’s intelligence operations maturity.

Leadership teams will keep traveling. Public visibility will keep rising. And adversaries will keep getting better at collecting signals. The open question is whether your organization will treat executive protection like an occasional service—or like the continuous, intelligence-led mission it has become.