Amin Al-Ait
Founder, QG Intelligence (Quantitative Geopolitical Intelligence) · Cloud Data Engineer
QG Intelligence finds the structural fingerprints countries leave across their economic, political, and governance indicators before major events, matches them against a curated historical record, and surfaces reproducible precedents that analysts can evaluate on the evidence.
A world where geopolitical risk is read from the data, patterns, and precedents themselves, where every assessment is clear and grounded, and where the evidence does the talking rather than the pundit or the black box.
How QGI came to be
The question that started QG Intelligence came from a football video game. As a Data Science student at TU Dortmund, I was playing EA FC (formerly FIFA) and found myself more interested in the underlying player ratings than the game itself. EA had built a system that could represent the performance and behavior of individual footballers as a structured, comparable score from a dense set of observable indicators. I kept returning to a single question: could you do the same for countries? Not their GDP, not their headline political classification, but their behavioral fingerprint across dozens of economic, political, and governance dimensions, tracked over time.
That question sat in the background through my engineering work. The version I kept coming back to was more specific: if you could encode a country's indicator trajectory in the years before a major event, could you find other countries that had followed the same path? Not as a simulation, and not as a causal claim. Simply as a structural match, the way a diagnostician looks for a clinical picture in the historical record.
The closest analogue I found early on was the Saudi-Azeri pair. Two countries from different regions, different governance traditions, and different economic structures, that nonetheless showed striking convergence across governance and economic indicators in the period before significant geopolitical events. That convergence was not a prediction. It was a pattern that surfaced from the data, that a trained analyst could interrogate, contest, or rule out. That is what I wanted QGI to surface.
Early versions were rough. The platform has gone through six major rebuilds since 2021. The honest number I track is the lift in the top-50 country rankings over a random baseline: it has moved from 0.07 to 0.14 to 0.19 across successive methodology iterations. That is not a dramatic figure. It represents incremental, evidence-accountable improvement in the core task.
The data infrastructure behind QGI draws on Open Source Intelligence sourcing across the full set of countries the platform covers. The integration spans political, economic, governance, and institutional indicators from multiple public providers. No single source dominates. The methodology is designed to be auditable: every precedent match comes with the indicators that drove it, the historical record it was matched against, and the scoring logic that produced the result.
The intended audience is not the general public. I built QGI for analysts who already work in geopolitical risk: insurance underwriters pricing sovereign exposure, policy analysts building scenario frameworks, sovereign risk teams at financial institutions, writers who cover political instability for audiences with real budgets. These are professionals who are skeptical of black-box outputs and need to understand the evidence chain behind any conclusion. QGI is designed to show its work.
I am a Cloud Data Engineer by background. I built QGI because the question from that TU Dortmund afternoon never stopped being interesting. The infrastructure, the methodology, and the platform are the result of working on that question seriously for five years without the pressure of a commercial deadline. Whether QGI becomes a product or a research contribution, the analytical core will remain the same: structural fingerprints, historical precedents, and reproducible evidence.
The platform is still expanding. It is also imperfect, and thorny in places. If any of that resonates, or if you work somewhere QGI could be useful, I would enjoy hearing from you.