How a Brain gets built
Twelve weeks from the first conversation to a Brain that works a shift in your firm. Four stages, and at the end of each one a decision that is yours to make, not ours.
The Map
Before a line of it is built, we map what your firm already knows. Where the facts sit today, in systems, in inboxes, in drives, and in people's heads. Which decisions get made, by whom, and on what basis.
What happens
- We sit with the people who do the work, not only the people who run it.
- Every source of fact is located and named, including the ones nobody has written down.
- Decisions are traced backwards: who decided, on what, and what they had in front of them.
- Workflows are scored on volume, on the cost of getting them wrong, and on how much is already recorded.
What we need from you
- Four to six hours from the people who do the work.
- Permission to name your sources. Nothing is connected at this stage.
- One person inside the firm who can answer a question the same day.
What you hold at the end
- A map of your organisation's memory, drawn.
- A ranked shortlist of the workflows worth giving to a Brain, with the reasoning shown.
- A fixed scope and a fixed price for stage one.
You can stop here. The map is yours to keep, and it is worth having whether or not we ever build anything.
Analyse
The Brain learns to perceive. We connect the sources on the map, it reads what your firm holds, and it does nothing else with what it reads. You watch it read.
What happens
- Named sources are connected one at a time, in the order the map set.
- Documents become fields, and what a document fails to say is marked as clearly as what it says.
- New information is placed against the clients, cases and outcomes you already hold.
- You get a daily view of what it saw and what it made of it.
What we need from you
- Access to the sources on the map, scoped to what the shortlist actually needs.
- One hour a week to look at what it is reading.
- A named owner for each source.
What you hold at the end
- Your firm's knowledge in one structured memory, every fact traceable to where it came from.
- A written record of what it could not read, and why.
Nothing has acted yet. If perception is not accurate enough, we stop, and the structured memory stays yours.
Control
The Brain learns judgement. Your thresholds, your escalation, your rules. It proposes, your people decide, and every day the two are compared. You see the agreement rate before you are asked to trust anything.
What happens
- Your rules are written down, often for the first time, and then encoded.
- Shadow mode runs: it proposes, your people decide, and both are recorded side by side.
- Disagreements are reviewed every week, and it is the rules that move, never the record.
- Rights are set: what it may see, what it may propose, and what it may never touch.
What we need from you
- The person who actually holds the judgement, for two hours a week.
- Honest disagreement. A shadow run where nobody argues teaches nothing.
What you hold at the end
- Your firm's judgement written down and auditable, in a form that stands on its own.
- A measured agreement rate between the Brain and your own people.
- A rights model your compliance function can read.
The agreement rate is a number, not an opinion. You decide whether it is high enough to go on.
Execute
The Brain gets hands. One workflow, narrow permission, and everything else stays in shadow until that first one has become boring.
What happens
- The highest ranked workflow goes live, and only that one.
- Every action is logged with the reasoning that produced it, and every action can be reversed.
- Approval sits with a person for exactly as long as you want it to.
- When the first workflow has been uneventful for two weeks, the second one starts.
What we need from you
- One workflow owner who is accountable for the result.
- A decision on where approval sits, and on what would let it be relaxed.
What you hold at the end
- Work being done, with a full record of every action and the reason behind it.
- A pattern for adding the next workflow without opening a new project.
Permission widens only when you widen it. Nothing goes live by default, and nothing goes live quietly.
It lives
A Brain is not delivered and left. It keeps reading, the memory keeps growing, and the judgement moves as your firm's judgement moves.
What happens
- A monthly review of what it decided and where it was corrected.
- New workflows added from the shortlist, at your pace, not ours.
- The memory compounds, which is the one part of this that cannot be bought later.
What we need from you
- One review a month.
- A note when the firm changes how it decides something, so the Brain changes with it.
Every stage ends with something of your own.
The map
Where your firm's knowledge actually sits, and which decisions depend on it. Useful on its own.
The structured memory
What you already hold, in one place, with every fact traceable back to its source.
The written judgement
The rules your best people apply, stated plainly, in a form your compliance function can read.
All three are readable without us and portable away from us. That is deliberate. A firm that can only keep what it built by keeping the builder has not been given very much.
What it asks of you
This is the part firms underestimate. A Brain cannot learn judgement that nobody is willing to state out loud.
Time
- Hours from the people who do the work, not delegated downward to whoever is free.
- Roughly one to two hours a week per stage, from two or three people.
Access
- Scoped and staged, source by source, never all at once.
- Nothing is connected before the map says why it should be.
Candour
- A willingness to write down judgement that currently lives in heads.
- Disagreement during shadow mode, said out loud and recorded.
The shape of it
Staged commitment, priced stage by stage. You are never asked to buy the whole thing on the strength of a conversation.
- The map is a fixed fee, agreed before it starts.
- Every stage after it is fixed scope and fixed price, quoted at the gate before it, once we both know what is actually there.
- No open ended engagement, and no charge for a stage you have not agreed to.
- Founding partners in a market are on different terms, because they shape what gets built. Founding partners
[FIXED FEE FOR THE MAP, AND THE INDICATIVE RANGE PER STAGE, TO BE SUPPLIED BEFORE THIS PAGE GOES LIVE]
What the finished Brain is, in one place.
The BrainStart with the map.
Two weeks, a fixed fee, and the map is yours either way.
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