Twelve parts, and what passes between them.
Your systems come in through connectors and are kept in the record. A question comes in through its door, from an AI tool or from a person; what the asker may see is checked first, and the answer is found in the record, in your own terms. Acting goes through a second door, with approvals. Testing and upkeep run under all of it, and the work before anything is built comes first.
The record, the way in to it, and the part your people write.
01 · the truth store and write pipeline
The record
Everything the company knows, kept as documents people can read, with a full history of every change. Nothing goes in unchecked, and everything else in the brain can be rebuilt from it.
02 · the index and retrieval engine
Finding the answer
Turns a question into an answer with its sources, or into a plain “I can’t answer that well”. A question that needs an exact count goes to a checked query on the system that holds the numbers.
03 · the company manual and authority contract
The company manual
The part your people write: what your terms mean, who owns each definition, which system is the authority for each figure, and the decisions on record. It is useful from the first day.
The doors in, what comes through them, and who may use them.
04 · the access layer
The way in for AI tools
The door your AI tools come through, on the same terms for every tool. Reading and suggesting go through one door and taking actions through another, so what an AI tool reads and what it may do are kept apart.
05 · connectors and signal routing
Connectors
Material comes in only from sources someone accountable has named, each with an owner and a date to review it, along one route that notices duplicates, updates and contradictions.
06 · identity and entitlements
Who may see and do what
People, agents and scheduled jobs each hold explicit permissions, and every permission expires unless it is renewed. The brain only gathers what the person asking is allowed to see.
Where people use it, and what AI may do with it.
07 · agents and actions
Agents and actions
Agents that carry out work, but only through actions agreed in advance, each with limits and approvals and a named owner. Some actions are never available to any agent.
08 · surfaces and the panel
Where people use it
An assistant inside the tools people already use, a dashboard, a readable view of the record, and the screens for approving, correcting and adding to it.
Tested on your questions, kept current, and started properly.
09 · evaluation and assurance
Testing it on your own questions
A test set made of your company’s own real questions, run regularly. How often it answers is reported next to how often it is right, and every agreed definition is checked against its source.
10 · operations and lifecycle
Keeping it running
The upkeep that stops it going quietly out of date, a plan for when something goes wrong, who answers when it does, and what happens over the brain’s life, including leaving.
11 · the fleet and install layer
Keeping every brain current
How the brains we look after stay up to date: each one reports which version it runs, fixes reach all of them, and nothing passes from one company’s brain to another’s.
12 · discovery instruments
Before anything is built
The work that comes first: the question audit, a check of how sound your data and documents are, an early end-to-end connection test, and the approvals worth starting early.
It starts before anything is built.
A discovery call, then the question audit: about two hundred real questions from your business, each given a written verdict, so you know what a company brain would and would not answer for you before any of the other eleven parts is built.