I’m in Queenstown and Wanaka this week, delivering AI Training workshops to corporate teams. This is a non-AI-edited photo. (I like to share those once ina while, too, to remind you I’m still human.) During the Ai202: AI for Knowledgebases workshop, we discussed the challenges of digitising this institutional knowledge. Part of the challenge is architectural: creating the right permissions structure, so the right people have access to the right levels of information. The second challenge is ingestion – making sure new data continually contributes. To do this, you need ongoing human input to adjudicate what is and isn’t the right way to do things. This is the work of the future: training AI agents to make human choices. To train AI agents well, to continually improve over time, you need an ongoing, growing database of those choices. That’s the Company Brain.
💡 A Company Brain is connected context in action.Your ability to capture digital residue of institutional knowledge as it is created, and query it as needed, will determine your organisation’s thinking capacity. Recording your meetings and automating the transcripts is only the first step. What does your Company Brain do with all that information?
That unspoken structure that currently lives in the network of meat computers in the skulls of your team – that’s what Zoe Scaman calls Heartwood. 🤖 Building a Company BrainThere are a variety of tools that can be used to make and maintain a Company Brain:
At its core, you want a series of markdown files that can reference one another quickly. Who manages the Company Brain? In an AI Working Group, that person’s role is The Skull. They protect the Company Brain, help it to grow, and make sure the right people have access to it. You could use a RAG, Retrieval Augmented Generation, and you could code it all up yourself. Or you can go with a tool like Caitlyn.AI, and have them set it up for you. If you want a specific recommendation for your business, you could schedule an AI Agent Assessment with me. 📈 Relevant Statistics
🧠 📦 Game: Brain in a BoxGOAL: Connect a pile of documents into a searchable Company Brain. RULES: Download a document collection, upload into a Project (for Claude/ChatGPT) or a Notebook (for Gemini/Copilot), and ask questions. FEEDBACK: How can this evolve beyond a search box, into interconnection? Turn up your reasoning, upload a document dump, and enter the following prompts sequentially:
If you want some advice on structuring your own Company Brain, schedule an AI Agent Assessment. I’ll interview you in our first 45-minute call, then write you a report, and we’ll go over it in our second call.
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Capture Institutional Knowledge in a Company Brain
