The Company Brain

What This Guide Is

The Company Brain is a complete implementation manual for building an internal knowledge assistant on Claude Projects: the knowledge audit that finds the 20% of documents answering 80% of questions, the rewrite pass that makes documents AI-readable, the battle-tested instruction "constitution" that prevents hallucinated policy answers, a complete one-afternoon pilot walkthrough, and the rollout, adoption, and maintenance systems that keep it trustworthy after the novelty fades.

No engineering, no vendor procurement. One operations-minded person and the discipline to audit before uploading.

What's Inside

The Foundation

• What a company brain replaces (Slack archaeology, the human search engine) — and what it never should (judgment calls, sensitive cases)
• How Projects actually reads your files: full-context vs retrieval mode, and the 10–20 document design rule that falls out of it
• The knowledge audit: harvest two weeks of real questions, map them to documents, pick the right pilot domain

The Build

• Documents Claude can actually use: heading rules, self-contained sections, tables for numbers, and the AI-assisted rewrite prompt with [CLARIFY] markers
• Capturing tribal knowledge: voice memo → structured SOP in 15 minutes per topic
• The instruction constitution: mandatory citations, the scripted "I don't know," conflict surfacing, and the sensitive-topic bright line
• The complete pilot walkthrough: HR onboarding assistant from zero to red-teamed and soft-launched in one afternoon

Running It

• 7 prompt patterns for ops & HR: policy Q&A, onboarding plans, SOPs from meeting transcripts, policy-change diffs, audit prep, monthly gap reports
• Security & privacy: the exclusion list, plan-level data terms, and access design by Project membership
• Rollout & adoption: the redirect month, the onboarding scavenger hunt, the champion model, and measuring interruptions avoided
• Maintenance cadences that take 30 minutes a month — plus the troubleshooting table for all five bad-answer patterns

Scaling

• Department blueprints ready to copy: AskIT, AskFinance, AskSales, AskSupport, AskFacilities — each with its upload set and domain-specific trap
• Multi-brain architecture on the Team plan, and the honest signs you've outgrown Projects

Who This Is For

This guide is for the person who IS currently the company brain — and would like to delegate the job to something that doesn't take PTO.