About Zach Long and Eric Schwartz

Zachary Long and Eric Schwartz are the co-founders of Conductor AI. Both spent seven years at Palantir, where they met on a Department of Justice project supporting large-scale fraud prosecutions. But this wasn’t “start a company at first sight.” After collaborating, they split: Eric moved toward law enforcement and other USG components, then took what he calls “a bit of a rumspringa” into health tech; Zach went deeper into the Department of Defense. When Zach decided to leave Palantir, the two reconnected. Ben, the third co-founder, knew Zach from college and originated the idea with him; Eric joined shortly after as the first employee and built out the company.

The founding insight came from Zach’s own frustration. He wanted to write up a meeting in a Slack channel and was told he could not. He asked why. The internal security team said no, and there was no mechanism to challenge it. “Show me the document,” he said. Nobody could. Multiply that across the defense supply chain and you have put your finger on the systemic over-classification that riddles the national security enterprise. With a bit of good luck (and good timing), the LLM era arrived, and Zach found his solution.

About Conductor AI

Conductor AI builds software for high-stakes government decision workflows: security classification and declassification, foreign disclosure, export licensure, FOIA, and evidence review on the justice side. The platform ingests complex policy documents and institutional tradecraft, then orchestrates the decision tree a human expert would walk. The goal is for the product to generate more than just an answer; it also shares an underlying policy that supports it, so the reviewer can show the math to a starred superior.

Their customers are some of the least glamorous and most under-resourced offices in national security. One person at Nellis Air Force Base handles the entire technical manual transfer review process for the Air Force: 500,000 pages. One GS-13 adjudicates roughly $40 billion in export license approvals a year. These offices ask for more people annually and receive rotational staff who take six months to train and serve twelve months in seat.

The company has solid early traction: a direct-to-Phase-II Air Force Open Topic SBIR, deployment on classified networks with multiple releases per week, and two multinational exercises this summer. Those exercises were big wins, as they were able to take reviews that typically take a day down to an hour.

Key Takeaways

1. Sell at the friction point.

Conductor’s first thesis was to help people determine the correct classification of a document. They quickly learned this was directionally right but commercially wrong. Almost nobody sits down with a security classification guide and asks that question in the abstract. The acute pain was at the transfer point: when someone needs to move this information to a foreign partner, the question is, “can I?” That reorientation was a powerful business unblocker.

2. Cold outbound is a validation instrument.

Zach’s first contract came from spamming federal employees on LinkedIn. Enough of them assumed it was a phishing test that it became a running joke with customers. The fact that he was able to get strangers to reply to a cold message about classification review was pretty compelling evidence that the pain was real.

3. A cracked door is better than a closed one.

The Conductor team quickly found that attempting to convince an incumbent process owner to reform was a tall task. Instead, Conductor began looking for teams that were charged with improving classification management. These offices often came with some leadership buy-in, which made them qualified candidates for early adoption. Attitudinally, they were more likely to house people looking for a fresh approach, rather than defending an existing one.

4. Earn trust by grading yourself against decisions the customer already made.

Conductor was able to create a compelling sales motion by using backtests. If a prospective customer office processed 85 license applications last month and decided 16, Conductor could get their policy documents and tradecraft, and see how closely their software matched the 16. It converts an unfalsifiable AI claim into a measurable one, uses only the customer’s data, and leaves their judgment as the answer key.

5. The durable advantage is domain context, not model access.

Every competitor has the same frontier models. What Conductor has is what Eric calls “old school context, not model context.” Both founders completed the foreign disclosure training courses, they go on-site, and they build prototypes next to the person doing the work. Change management, accreditation, collaboration, security, and test-and-evaluation are not solved by an LLM. In defense, the willingness to learn someone else’s tradecraft is a signal of commitment, and is the secret sauce behind the “forward deployed” model. That is the reason that the Conductor team sees their primary bottleneck as hiring cleared people, not compute.

Learn more about Conductor AI: conductorai.com
Follow Zach: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zachary-long-20a78a21/
Follow Eric: https://www.linkedin.com/in/epschwartz/
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Crossing the Valley

Ep. 92: Conductor AI is building the layer…