Build a
Company Brain
How is your organisation answering questions like...
Connect approved files
Keep user permissions
Answer with sources
Staff get answers from information they can already access.
Questions only one person can answer
What did we charge a similar customer for something like this last year?
What price did we use for product X? What's its margin?
Who's the contact at Supplier Y? Why did we pick them? What contract terms did we negotiate?
Who's the best person to speak to for advice about Z? What's the procedure? What exceptions has a senior manager allowed in the past?
If it takes more than a quick google of your shared drive to answer any of these questions, if it means referring to three different document stores, trawling through email or desperately hoping to bump into a more experienced colleague, your company's institutional knowledge is scattered and hard to use.
The answer: build your company a brain. We help with that.
AI tools are brilliant, but without knowledge of what makes your organisation special they're no more than very sophisticated typewriters. Your organisation's knowledge is what makes it special. Often, though, this knowledge isn't fully documented. Some of it lives in wikis and knowledge bases, but the most interesting bits live in people's heads. Some of it is captured in spreadsheets that only one person knows how to interpret. Some of it isn't written down anywhere.
Building a company brain
The heart of the solution is an AI which has been given access to all of your documents, internal apps, CRM, chat, email, maybe even phone and meeting transcriptions, and can use that to answer questions. We'll build a pipeline which reads through your approved information stores and indexes them, remembering who wrote them, where they came from and when they were written. When a question is put to your company brain, the brain digs out relevant information and shows you the relevant sections with a link to the source. If there are important details only captured in calls and meetings, we'll also transcribe them with appropriate permissions and include them, with clear rules for how long transcripts are retained.
Working with us to build a company brain means we'll...
- Sit down with you to work out what information assets your business has, where they are, who looks after them, how up-to-date they are, how sensitive they are and how hard it would be to rebuild them. The goal is a one-page overview.
- Identify gaps in documentation. Where necessary, carry out structured interviews with experienced colleagues to fill them. We'll always try to avoid asking people to document things from scratch.
- Agree permissions, who is allowed to see what, with an eye to reusing existing permissions wherever possible. The brain should integrate with single sign-on so that if an employee leaves your organisation their access to confidential documents should be removed.
- Agree rules for minimising hallucination, the brain will only answer questions which are covered by passages from approved information sources, quoting these passages and linking to them so humans can verify answers. Where necessary, the brain will say it doesn't have the answer.
- Agree rules for freshness, the brain should flag when it finds conflicting or apparently stale information, and route these for human attention. We'll work with you to nominate people to check these.
- Agree privacy, legal and compliance requirements. Where relevant, we'll help with records of processing, GDPR-compliant retention and erasure both within source documents and at brain-level, and retention rules. If you're required to carry out a data protection impact assessment we'll help with this. Your data will stay within UK/EU borders, will be hosted on your organisation's cloud, and won't be used to train any foundation models.
- Think carefully about how to transcribe meetings and client calls, ensuring all participants' rights are upheld, everyone's agreement is sought and data is retained for an agreed period only.
- Scope, prioritise and build the brain. Often it makes sense to start with one workflow, customer service call preparation or draft replies, employee onboarding, preparing for supplier negotiations, researching bids...
How to engage with us
Arrange a call with us and describe the sorts of questions which require asking a particular person before you'll be able to answer them. We'll talk through whether pointing an AI tool at some carefully curated files would be enough, or whether you need something more sophisticated built. We'll charge a fee to carry out the knowledge audit, permissions analysis and gap-filling exercise above. Once we understand your requirements we'll come back with a proposal for a first release of a company brain, phased and prioritised, with costs, timescales and success criteria. This will reflect the complexity of the target workflow(s) and the number and quality of available data sources.
What sort of questions need a particular person's input before they can be answered? Arrange a call to find out whether a company brain could help.