Protos Labs has announced the launch of a freemium edition of Protos AI, a platform that deploys specialized AI agents augmenting cyber threat intelligence (CTI) analyst teams by executing structured investigations from planning to reporting. The new tier enables security teams to operationalize AI-driven investigations without committing to closed vendor ecosystems or overhauling existing security stacks.
As AI adoption accelerates across cybersecurity, many organizations face a gap between experimentation and practical implementation. ISC2’s 2024 Cybersecurity Workforce Study reports a global workforce gap of 4.8 million professionals, compounded by increasing workloads and budget constraints. Hiring alone will not close that gap, and security leaders are increasingly looking to AI as force multiplier.
However, many AI capabilities are embedded within single-vendor platforms, requiring ecosystem-wide adoption before teams can evaluate real-world value.
Protos AI eliminates the need for costly rip-and-replace investments or single-vendor lock-in. The platform-independent model works across an enterprise’s existing security stack to deliver immediate value while building compounding intelligence that any organization owns.
Rather than acting as a general-purpose assistant, Protos AI deploys coordinated AI agents with the context and skills of a CTI analyst. These agents are assigned specialized roles that execute structured investigations aligned to each phase of the CTI lifecycle: planning, evidence collection, correlation, analysis, and citation-backed reporting. Human analysts remain in control – approving investigation plans, guiding direction, and validating outputs before dissemination.
“The next phase of cybersecurity will be defined not by the number of analysts you hire, but by how effectively your intelligence compounds,” said Joel Lee, CEO of Protos Labs.
“AI agents make this possible by executing structured investigations at scale – handling tasks that previously relied on rote work from constrained teams. As these processes become systematic, intelligence becomes an enduring organizational asset, not just a series of isolated reports. This approach remains the same for other domains of intelligence like fraud and supply chain, especially as we see them converge more with cyber. We could be looking at new ways of intelligence work as a whole. Human analysts remain central, focusing on strategy, nuance, and critical decision-making, while AI drives repeatable execution for lasting advantage,” Lee continued.
Freemium access for immediate operational use
The Protos AI freemium edition offers security teams immediate access to autonomous, agent-run investigations without need for data migration or deployment overheads. The platform accelerates time-to-value for use cases like prioritizing actively exploited vulnerabilities, BEC campaign analysis, weekly executive threat snapshots, and credential exposure monitoring.
Powered by a curated marketplace of open-source intelligence integrations, Protos AI conducts structured, multi-step investigations autonomously, correlating threat entities, querying live sources, and delivering citation-backed investigative reports in minutes.
For organizations requiring enterprise integrations including commercial threat feeds, SIEM and EDR telemetry, asset inventories, and proprietary systems, deeper connectivity is available within the paid enterprise edition.
Intelligence that compounds
Protos AI introduces what the company calls “organizational intelligence memory.”
Each investigation contributes to a persistent intelligence record owned by the organization. The system automatically links IP addresses, domains, malware families, threat actors, and related entities across investigations. When indicators resurface months later, historical context appears automatically, reducing repetitive analysis and preserving institutional knowledge despite workforce turnover.
This transforms investigations from one-off analyses into a repeatable and compounding intelligence capability.
Model-agnostic and ecosystem-independent
Protos AI operates independently of any single AI provider and supports models like Azure OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google Gemini. Organizations can configure deployments according to internal security, compliance, and cost requirements.
The platform supports deployment across public cloud, isolated enterprise VPCs, on-premise infrastructure, and restricted environments.
