Every question lands in one of three groups.
A company brain is not the answer to every question a business asks, and the expensive way to find that out is after building one. The audit finds out first, on your questions rather than on a demonstration.
It would answer these well.
The answer exists, in a document, a system or a decision on record, and a company brain would find it and say where it came from.
These need a different tool.
A count, a total or a live figure belongs to the system that holds the numbers, asked through a checked query. Saying so now saves building the wrong thing.
Nothing can answer these yet.
The answer lives in someone’s head, or nowhere: a definition nobody owns, a decision nobody wrote down. The audit names the work that would have to come first.
A written answer to whether a company brain is worth building.
A verdict on every question
Each one sorted into one of the three groups, in writing, with the reason. Not a sample and not a score: the questions your business actually asks.
The share it would answer, before you sign
How many of your real questions a company brain would answer well, by type of question, and how many fall outside it. You see the number before you commit to anything.
The work that has to come first
For the questions nothing can answer yet, what is missing and who would own it. Much of that is worth doing whether or not you build a brain.
Something that stays yours
The questions and the verdicts are yours, whatever you decide. If you go ahead, the questions become the test the brain is measured against.
| question | asked in | verdict | why | what comes first |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| How is a pricing exception approved? | the channels | would answer well | It is in the pricing policy, which has an owner. | nothing |
| What did we agree at the last contract review? | the inbox | would answer well | It is in the meeting notes, with the date and who was there. | nothing |
| How many tickets are open right now? | the support queue | needs a different tool | A live count belongs to the support system, through a checked query. | Connect the query, not the documents. |
| What was revenue last quarter? | your teams | needs a different tool | A total belongs to the finance system that holds the numbers. | Name the system as the authority for the figure. |
| What does an active customer mean here? | your teams | nothing can answer yet | Teams use different definitions, and nobody owns one. | Agree one definition, and name its owner. |
| Why was the old onboarding dropped? | the inbox | nothing can answer yet | The decision was made in a meeting nobody wrote down. | Record the decision, with who made it and why. |
| A real sheet runs to about two hundred questions, all of them your own, and ends with the share a company brain would answer well, by type of question. That share is worked out from your questions, so there is none here. | ||||
Access to where your questions are asked, and a little time.
The questions come from where your people ask them today: your teams, your inbox, your support queue, the channels where someone asks how a thing is done. A workshop produces the questions people think they ask; the real ones come from the work.
You provide access to those, and time with the people who own the answers, so we can tell where each answer lives now. The questions stay confidential, and the audit is owned by the part of the business whose people ask them, not by IT.
A small fixed fee, credited against what follows.
The audit is a fixed fee, agreed before it starts. If you go ahead, all of it is credited against the build or the service, whichever of the two ways to have it you choose.
How long it takes depends on where your questions live and how many places they are asked. We agree the timing on the discovery call, before anything is signed.
You decide, with the evidence in front of you.
If the audit says a company brain is not the right tool for your business, it says so, and you have spent a small fee rather than a build.
If you go ahead, the brain is built for your company, and your questions become the test it is measured against. It claims no accuracy figure until your own questions have measured one. What a company brain is.
It starts with a discovery call.
What your business needs to know, where that knowledge lives today, and whether the audit is worth doing. If it is not, we will say so.
Not ready to talk? The ten-minute diagnostic (opens in a new tab) is a first look you can take yourself, and the context audit skill runs a first version of the method in your own AI assistant.