A Few Million Words In, It Starts to Act Like a Counterpart

I flew to Denver 3 weeks ago to help build a company brain.

The founders came to me with a narrower ask. The context from their sales and fundraising calls never reached the product team. Since those calls are recorded, it was a pretty simple automation: an agent reviews the conversations for product insights and adds them to the product backlog. I added chiefs of staff for the founders that prep the day, draft the important emails, and cut the noise.

Underneath those automations sits 2.5 million words on their own business, with hundreds of customer product-feedback items pulled from the calls. Ask it what happened on a deal that ran for 3 months last year and it has already pieced together the timeline from the meetings and the emails.

The surprise came 3 weeks in. When I asked one of the founders how it was going, the automations barely came up.

He told me the brain had become his counterpart. He's using it to iterate on his business strategy and understand the full context of what is happening across all functions.

It's already driven a decision. With the traffic and the payments sitting within the brain, he saw a number he didn't like, so he paused a set of campaigns. He's also piloting a completely new monetization strategy alongside his new counterpart. Now the founder is looking to build self-improving loops based on the data inflow for better marketing, product and consumer behavior. More to come here.

So, what's a company brain? Every scrap of digital information you can aggregate about your business (emails, Drive, meeting transcripts, texts, LinkedIn chats), continuously ingested, with a CRM inside on every customer and their status. The first load is a heavy lift but then the ongoing maintenance is much easier.

This whole concept is really just about giving timely information to an agent to do whatever needs to happen. Most agents get built without that, and that's the reason agent implementations fail.

What the brain gives you is a corpus any new agent can tap. Instead of building one marketing agent and compiling its context from scratch, it already has 80% of what it needs.

I think every company, or every department inside a larger company, needs to start building this now. Even without a full brain, just aggregating what you know about your business in digital form will be the advantage in the coming months and years.

You hire an employee, you don't expect them to know your business day one. Treat the agent the same way and give it feedback. A few million words in, it starts to act like a counterpart.