The How to series · Post 20
One connection: every AI tool shares the same brain
For UK business owners with a small team and a growing pile of AI logins: feeding three tools the same answers costs about £1,700 a year in minutes, and more when the copies drift.
It's 4pm on a Tuesday. A new AI assistant is asking you to describe your business again. What you sell, who buys it, how you price, how you like to sound. You typed most of this into the last tool, and the one before that.
There are now three versions of the same answers living in three logins, and no way to tell which one a draft came from.
That's the loop this post is about: re-feeding every AI tool by hand. Each new tool starts from zero and gets things wrong in its own way. It adds another copy of the business that somebody has to keep alive.
The maths (a sketch, not a client figure)
- 15 minutes a day re-answering the same questions into whichever tool is asking (services, prices, how jobs run, how you talk to customers)
- × 5 days = 75 minutes a week
- × £30 an hour = about £38 a week
- × 46 working weeks = about £1,700 a year
The minutes understate it. The real cost is the copies drifting apart: one tool believes you do Saturday deliveries and another is working from last year's prices. A draft goes out carrying whichever version it was fed. That cost never appears on a timesheet. It appears the day a client spots it.
Score it: the three checks
The same three checks we use everywhere:
- Hours. How much of the week it eats (0 to 5)
- Repeat. Could a new starter follow it from one page? (0 to 5)
- Risk-if-wrong. If it slips once, how bad? (0 to 5. High means the rules are obvious and a slip is recoverable)
Re-feeding tools scores Hours 3 (it hides inside other tasks, which is why it feels smaller than it is), Repeat 4 (the answers are the same every time, which is exactly the point: they should exist once, not once per tool), Risk-if-wrong 4 (a stale answer becomes a wrong draft, but a person approves anything before it sends, so the slip gets caught where it should be caught).
Two checks at 4 or more: start narrow. Write the ten answers you typed most this month into one file. That file is the seed of a business brain.
Try one thing this week (free)
Open a blank document. Write the ten things every AI tool ends up being told: what the business sells, who it's for, the prices you're happy to state, the questions customers ask most. One sentence each. On Friday, next time a tool asks one of those questions, answer from the file instead of retyping. If the file already had the answer, you've seen the shape of one clean home for the business.
Where a person stays
One clean home changes what the team sees as much as what the tools know. People see status, not a stream of AI output: drafted, waiting for approval. Someone taps yes. Nothing sends unchecked. Financial, compliance and legal work stays approval-only in every setup we build. The brain holds what the company knows. People still decide what gets done with it.
FAQ
A wiki stores documents that somebody has to remember to update, and the one nobody updates is a classic for a reason. A business brain is filled from the apps and documents you already have, plus a short interview. It watches live systems too, so it doesn't depend on anyone keeping it fed.
That's the point of the shape. The brain lives in plain files the business owns, and any AI tool reads it through one connection. Swap the assistant, keep the brain. If we stopped tomorrow, you'd take the whole thing with you. That's no lock-in as a design decision, not a sales promise.
People see status, not content: what's drafted, what's waiting, what's been approved, and what needs a decision today. A team member sees a job and a decision to make, not a stream of output about somebody's accounts.
No. The brain is filled from the apps and documents already in use, plus a short interview. Nothing gets ripped out. The tools keep doing their jobs, and the brain is the one place where what the company knows actually lives.
From what's already there: connections to the tools you use and the documents that matter, plus a short interview about how the business runs. Then it's kept alive, watching live systems and warning before problems bite, which is what the morning brief is for.