A veteran owned artificial intelligence firm has partnered with one of the country’s premier intelligence training programs to give students hands-on experience with “hallucination-resistant” AI tools — and the timing couldn’t be more pointed. As AI becomes a fixture in professional workflows, new research is underscoring just how much work remains to make these tools reliable enough for high-stakes environments.
The company, Data, announced a partnership with Mercyhurst University’s Center for Intelligence Research, Analysis and Training (CIRAT) in Erie, Pennsylvania. Under the agreement, students in Mercyhurst’s Intelligence Studies and Computer Information Science programs will gain direct access to Data’s reView platform, an AI-powered analysis tool built on GraphRAG technology already in use by federal agencies and Fortune 500 companies.
The partnership arrives against a backdrop of growing concern about AI accuracy in real-world settings. A peer-reviewed study published last year in Scientific Reports analyzed roughly 3 million user reviews across 90 AI-powered mobile applications and found that factual incorrectness was the single most common hallucination type reported by users, accounting for 38% of confirmed hallucination instances, followed by nonsensical or irrelevant output at 25% and fabricated information at 15%. Together, those three categories made up more than three-quarters of all reported AI errors — pointing to a fundamental breakdown in reliability and truthfulness that users encounter in everyday AI tools.
The study also found that 85% of hallucination-reporting review snippets exhibited strong negative sentiment, with phrases like “made this up” and “wrong information” appearing far more frequently than in general AI-related reviews.
For intelligence professionals, the stakes around AI accuracy are even higher than for the average app user. That’s precisely the gap the Data-CIRAT partnership aims to address.
“This partnership successfully bridges the gap between traditional tradecraft and the era of transparent, AI-powered insights,” said Eric Costantini, Data’s Chief Business Officer. “By putting our reView platform directly into the hands of CIRAT students, we are ensuring the next generation of analysts is equipped to handle the intelligence community’s most complex data challenges.”
CIRAT has a long track record of placing graduates across federal agencies, law enforcement organizations and the private sector. Executive Director Brian Fuller said the partnership fills a practical gap — giving students familiarity with tools they are likely to encounter on the job before they ever set foot in a professional role.
A key selling point of the reView platform is its emphasis on transparency and explainability — qualities that speak directly to the hallucination problem documented in the Scientific Reports research.
The training will focus on areas where AI can accelerate work CIRAT analysts already do — pattern recognition, relationship mapping, and drawing insights from multiple sources simultaneously — while maintaining what both organizations emphasize as a non-negotiable standard: human analytical oversight.
Rep. Mike Kelly (PA-16) praised the collaboration as a model for preparing the workforce for an AI-driven future. “It’s exciting to see the partnership that is developing between Mercyhurst University and Data to help professionals harness the power of new technologies right here in Western Pennsylvania,” he said.
Data is a Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business. CIRAT students have previously conducted threat assessments drawing on open-source intelligence across the clear, deep and dark web — the kind of complex, multi-layered work that the reView platform is designed to support.