Winning the Modern Battle of Marathon

February 16, 2026

How CPP Associates, NeuralSeek, and HPE Power AI Innovation with Security and Scale

By Paul O’Dell, Partner

CPP Associates

 

In 490 BC, the Greeks won the Battle of Marathon not by choosing offense or defense, but by executing both in disciplined formation, under pressure, at exactly the right moment.

Today’s organizations face a similar test.

AI promises speed, advantages, and transformation. But innovation must advance alongside security, compliance, and resilience, especially in highly regulated industries. The challenge isn’t whether to attack or defend. It’s how to do both at the same time.

And just like Marathon, success depends on coordination.

The Modern Battlefield
Finance teams, Federal systems integrators, manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, and legal service organizations operate in environments where data sensitivity, auditability, and trust are non-negotiable. At the same time, they are under relentless pressure to modernize, automate, and move faster. The reality? You can’t pause defense to play offense. And you can’t defend effectively without advancing.

Offense: AI That Advances the Mission

AI offense isn’t experimentation, it’s execution. CPP Associates helps organizations turn AI strategy into production-grade solutions that drive results. Across industries, that offense looks like:

• Finance: Intelligent document processing, risk analytics, automated reporting, and augmented customer engagement
• Federal Systems Integrators: Mission copilots, secure knowledge retrieval across siloed programs, and workflow automation
• Government Agencies: Secure knowledge assistants for policy and regulatory interpretation, citizen service automation, fraud detection, and mission-focused analytics across classified and public-sector environments
• Manufacturing: Predictive maintenance, quality intelligence, and real-time operational insights
• Pharmaceutical: Adverse event detection, clinical and regulatory document intelligence, and research knowledge extraction
• Legal Services: Contract and clause analysis, risk identification, e-discovery, and defensible legal research

NeuralSeek accelerates this offense by operationalizing AI models efficiently, ensuring performance, relevance, and reliability at scale. But offense alone doesn’t win Marathon.

Compute: The Force Multiplier

At Marathon, formation mattered. In modern AI, compute is the formation.

As AI workloads grow more complex, performance and scale become decisive advantages. HPE provides the infrastructure foundation that allows AI to operate where it matters most:

• HPE High‑Performance Computing (HPC): GPU-dense platforms for large‑scale training, simulation, and genomic, deep learning or molecular analytics
• HPE Cray and Superdome Flex: Extreme reliability and in-memory scale for mission-critical LLM workloads in regulated environments

Together, CPP’s strategy, NeuralSeek’s execution, and HPE’s compute power transform AI from promise into sustained advantage.

Defense: Security That Enables Speed

The Greeks protected their flanks while advancing on the Persian forces. Modern AI requires the same discipline

AI introduces new attack surfaces: model endpoints, data pipelines, code generation, and distributed inference environments. In industries like pharma, finance, and legal services, those risks carry outsized consequences.

Beyond infrastructure risk, organizations must address a new category of exposure: model behavior. Hallucinated outputs, unverified citations, data leakages, and unintended bias can undermine trust just as quickly as a cyberattack. In regulated environments, AI responses must be explainable, traceable, and grounded in approved data sources.

CPP Associates brings deep cybersecurity and resilience expertise, working with partners such as Centripetal, Fortinet, HPE Aruba, and HPE Zerto, to embed protection from day one. CPP Associates works with NeuralSeek to implement practical AI guardrails that ensure outputs are reliable and defensible.

HPE fortifies this defense with:

• Silicon Root of Trust
• Encrypted GPU pipelines and workload isolation
• Zero-trust‑aligned architectures
• Infrastructure-level compliance for GxP, HIPAA, GLP, and legal audit chains

Defense doesn’t slow innovation. Done right, it makes innovation possible.

The Marathon Formation

Winning organizations don’t sprint between pilots. They advance in formation.

A successful AI strategy aligns:

• High-value use cases tied to mission outcomes
• Governance and security designed from the start
• Right-sized compute using HPE HPC and Superdome platforms
• Continuous monitoring, resilience, and ownership

This is how AI becomes sustainable, not just deployed.

Where to Start

If you operate in a regulated, high-stakes environment, the question isn’t whether to choose AI or security, or innovation or infrastructure. It’s how to design them together.

CPP Associates, NeuralSeek, and HPE deliver the strategy, execution, compute power, and secure foundation needed to play offense, defense, and compute at the same time. And win your modern Battle of Marathon.