Highgift AI Corporation was founded in 2025 by Casey C. Jones to develop Quanti Based Cognition (QBC): a model-agnostic thinking layer that gives AI systems structured depth about people.
QBC operates above the foundation-model layer, rather than being embedded in any one model or vendor. It enables an organization to build a model of a customer base, workforce, voter segment, regulator, adversary, or allied population; examine how that population is likely to respond to a contemplated action; investigate why; and audit and update the analysis as evidence changes.
Today's AI systems are remarkably fluent. They can also produce confident but shallow explanations of customers, voters, workforces, and adversaries.
The limitation is structural. Foundation models learn principally from externalized human outputs: language, images, recorded choices, and observable behavior. But those outputs are evidence of cognition, not cognition itself. Human responses arise from mechanisms operating before and beneath their verbal explanation: aversion, attachment, fatigue, loss protection, identity defense, trust, internal conflict, and other forces that may never be expressed directly.
A language model can generate a plausible account of those forces. Its architecture does not require that account to be grounded in an explicit representation of them. It can therefore sound psychologically perceptive while remaining cognitively shallow.
The dominant synthetic-persona method begins with categories such as age, gender, income, region, occupation, ideology, or personality type. A language model then generates biographical and psychological detail beneath those labels.
The result can read like a person without containing a sufficiently deep model of one. Increasing model size produces richer narratives, but it does not, by itself, create the underlying cognitive structure those narratives appear to describe.
QBC reverses the direction of construction. It begins beneath demographic and psychographic labels, with computational cognitive units called Quanti. It models how interactions among those units generate motivations, meanings, identity commitments, trust relationships, internal tensions, resistance, and change. Demographic and behavioral characteristics can then emerge within the modeled persona rather than predetermining that persona from above.
QBC renders these modeled individuals as queryable Persona Voices, organized into Human Terrain Maps. Each terrain represents both the modeled internal cognitive structure of its Persona Voices and the relationships operating across the population.
Users can question the terrain, examine differences among its voices, inspect the modeled causes of a response, introduce new evidence, and compare predicted responses with observed outcomes. The terrain can therefore be audited, challenged, updated, and progressively validated rather than accepted as an opaque AI answer.
QBC grew out of a 25-year program of applied audience-insights research led by Jones. Its underlying methodology was developed through the analysis of more than $10 billion in marketing investment for organizations including Microsoft, Intel, Dell, and Verizon, then formalized over two decades into the cognitive architecture Highgift AI is now operationalizing.
Highgift AI brings together cognitive-architecture development, philosophy, physics and mathematics, enterprise operations, and senior military leadership.
Executive Leadership
Founder, CEO & QBC Architect
Jones founded Highgift AI and leads the design and operationalization of QBC. His background spans 25 years of applied audience research and strategy, including service as a Dell vice president, an agency CEO, and chief strategy officer for a technology practice. He was chief messaging architect for Army Strong and co-led strategy for Microsoft campaigns representing $3.6 billion in investment.
Research
Co-Investigator, Philosophy
Bonevac is Professor of Philosophy at The University of Texas at Austin, specializing in philosophical logic, metaphysics, and ethics. A 15-year collaborator with Jones, he contributes to QBC's logical, ontological, and epistemological foundations.
Co-Investigator, Physics & Mathematics Lead
McElfresh is a physicist and lecturer in electrical and computer engineering at Santa Clara University. He leads the translation of QBC's cognitive architecture into tractable mathematics and testable formal relationships.
Board
Board Member
General Campbell contributes senior defense, operational, and warfighter perspective. During his Army career, he served as the 34th Vice Chief of Staff of the Army and as commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan.
Board Member
Rodek advises Highgift AI on commercial strategy, enterprise operations, and finance. He is the former chairman and CEO of Hyperion Solutions and previously served as president and chief operating officer of Ingram Micro after a 16-year career at FedEx, where he rose to senior vice president for the Americas.
July 10, 2025
Our “Multimodal Persuasion and Influence Operation Detection” research received “Awardable” status from DARPA’s ERIS Marketplace — representing rigorous technical evaluation and competitive validation. This status allows government customers to expedite acquisition, bypassing lengthy traditional procurement phases.
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