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AI IN PRACTICE

The Intake

Find the facts, owners, and boundaries before the build.

Fields marked ★ are required. Anything left unanswered does not block the build: it ships as a numbered open question in the new brain’s register, and the system says UNKNOWN rather than guessing until the answer arrives. The form can be completed incrementally.

Section 1 · Identity

feeds → the constitution, house rules, company facts

  • ★Legal business name, exactly as it must appear
  • ★The name rule: how the name always appears, and how it must never appear. Abbreviations, the comma before LLC, permitted short forms
  • ★The one-liner: what you do, for whom, in one sentence
  • The thirty-second version, an elevator paragraph
  • ★What you do NOT do, and what you never want to be mistaken for
  • ★Industry, plus regulated flags: health, legal, financial, insurance
  • Geography served, which becomes a hard rule if the answer is one state
  • Web presence: domains, socials, existing live pages

Section 2 · People

feeds → governance and the org facts

  • ★Owner and final approver: name, role, contact
  • ★The brain operator, whoever runs the AI day to day
  • Additional approvers, and what each may approve
  • Team roster: name, role, contact, headshot
  • ★The money, legal and external-send gate: who can never be bypassed

Section 3 · Audiences

feeds → the target-audience files, two to four of them

Answered once per audience:

  • ★A label, like HOA board member, and who they actually are
  • What they want, and what they fear
  • Words they use, and words that turn them off
  • The single action we want from them
  • ★Which one is the hero audience. Exactly one yes

Section 4 · Voice

feeds → the voice files

  • ★Three to five voice adjectives
  • ★The default tone, picked from seven named registers
  • Approved signature phrases: things you actually say
  • ★Banned words and phrases
  • ★Three writing samples you love, yours or anyone’s, for reverse-engineering the voice
  • Mechanics: emoji policy, exclamation policy, whether humor is allowed

Section 5 · Hard rules

feeds → the guardrails

  • ★This AI must NEVER… say, do, or claim
  • ★Pricing publishing policy: public, quote-only, never published, or gated
  • Claims we can prove, each with its source, versus claims we must never make
  • Competitor mention policy
  • Anything low-profile or confidential the system must protect
  • House mechanics: date format, phone format, dash policy, capitalisation

Section 6 · Facts

feeds → the facts layer, the part everything else cites

  • ★Services and products: plain-English description, who it is for, price or range, timeline, which one is the flagship
  • ★Pricing detail, and exactly what is quotable
  • Credentials, licenses, certifications, awards. Verifiable only
  • Founding story, history, key dates
  • Stats you can cite, each with its source
  • ★The top ten questions clients ask, with your best answers
  • Testimonials, with written-permission status per quote
  • ★The document upload manifest: decks, price lists, sample deliverables, SOPs. Preserved verbatim

Section 7 · Market

feeds → competitor and SEO facts, and module triggers

  • Top three to five competitors, with your one-line take on each. Verified by live search at build time
  • Service area detail: cities and regions, ranked
  • Why you win: two to four pillars
  • SEO ambition, and target searches if known
  • Where clients actually come from today

Section 8 · Brand

feeds → the Brand OS, and house style

  • ★Brand maturity: a full Brand OS exists, or logo and colors only, or starting from scratch
  • Upload manifest: logos, fonts, guideline documents, collateral you love
  • Known color codes
  • Visual direction words, and brands you admire
  • The visual never-list
  • If starting from less than a full system: the Brand OS build request is generated automatically, and audited against a five-part contract before assembly proceeds

Section 9 · The collateral menu

feeds → skills, templates, and the routing table

  • ★Pick from the catalog: print, web, email, presentations, social, business documents, sales and ops
  • ★The first three pieces you need on day one. These become the reference gold standards, built first

Section 10 · Modules and infrastructure

feeds → optional modules and integrations

  • Website: keep existing, rebuild inside the brain, or none
  • A content and SEO engine, yes or no
  • Partner or account kits, and the list of accounts
  • Team size, which selects the workflow-zone variant
  • Meeting and transcript filing
  • Accounts that exist: repository, hosting, workspace, CRM, email sender. Credentials are never collected on a form, dashboard-only, as a rule

Section 11 · History

feeds → the memory layer

  • Decisions already locked, which the AI must not reopen
  • Known unknowns, seeded straight into the questions register
  • In-flight work: campaigns, launches, deadlines
What submitting produces

An intake packet: every answer keyed to its destination file, every unanswered field as a numbered open question, every promised upload with its target path, and a completion percentage. The packet, the uploads, and the signed-off Brand OS are the complete input to the build. The gap between this form and a finished brain is assembly, not invention.

Back to the brand systems

THE QUESTIONS, WRITTEN OUT

Every question the intake asks.

60 questions in 11 sections. Open a section to read them, or take the whole list with you.

01 / Identity+

Feeds into: the constitution, house rules, company facts

  1. REQLegal business name, exactly as it must appear
  2. REQThe name rule: how the name always appears, and how it must never appear. Abbreviations, the comma before LLC, permitted short forms
  3. REQThe one-liner: what you do, for whom, in one sentence
  4. The thirty-second version, an elevator paragraph
  5. REQWhat you do NOT do, and what you never want to be mistaken for
  6. REQIndustry, plus regulated flags: health, legal, financial, insurance
  7. Geography served, which becomes a hard rule if the answer is one state
  8. Web presence: domains, socials, existing live pages
02 / People+

Feeds into: governance and the org facts

  1. REQOwner and final approver: name, role, contact
  2. REQThe brain operator, whoever runs the AI day to day
  3. Additional approvers, and what each may approve
  4. Team roster: name, role, contact, headshot
  5. REQThe money, legal and external-send gate: who can never be bypassed
03 / Audiences+

Feeds into: the target-audience files, two to four of them

  1. REQA label, like HOA board member, and who they actually are
  2. What they want, and what they fear
  3. Words they use, and words that turn them off
  4. The single action we want from them
  5. REQWhich one is the hero audience. Exactly one yes
04 / Voice+

Feeds into: the voice files

  1. REQThree to five voice adjectives
  2. REQThe default tone, picked from seven named registers
  3. Approved signature phrases: things you actually say
  4. REQBanned words and phrases
  5. REQThree writing samples you love, yours or anyone’s, for reverse-engineering the voice
  6. Mechanics: emoji policy, exclamation policy, whether humor is allowed
05 / Hard rules+

Feeds into: the guardrails

  1. REQThis AI must NEVER… say, do, or claim
  2. REQPricing publishing policy: public, quote-only, never published, or gated
  3. Claims we can prove, each with its source, versus claims we must never make
  4. Competitor mention policy
  5. Anything low-profile or confidential the system must protect
  6. House mechanics: date format, phone format, dash policy, capitalisation
06 / Facts+

Feeds into: the facts layer, the part everything else cites

  1. REQServices and products: plain-English description, who it is for, price or range, timeline, which one is the flagship
  2. REQPricing detail, and exactly what is quotable
  3. Credentials, licenses, certifications, awards. Verifiable only
  4. Founding story, history, key dates
  5. Stats you can cite, each with its source
  6. REQThe top ten questions clients ask, with your best answers
  7. Testimonials, with written-permission status per quote
  8. REQThe document upload manifest: decks, price lists, sample deliverables, SOPs. Preserved verbatim
07 / Market+

Feeds into: competitor and SEO facts, and module triggers

  1. Top three to five competitors, with your one-line take on each. Verified by live search at build time
  2. Service area detail: cities and regions, ranked
  3. Why you win: two to four pillars
  4. SEO ambition, and target searches if known
  5. Where clients actually come from today
08 / Brand+

Feeds into: the Brand OS, and house style

  1. REQBrand maturity: a full Brand OS exists, or logo and colors only, or starting from scratch
  2. Upload manifest: logos, fonts, guideline documents, collateral you love
  3. Known color codes
  4. Visual direction words, and brands you admire
  5. The visual never-list
  6. If starting from less than a full system: the Brand OS build request is generated automatically, and audited against a five-part contract before assembly proceeds
09 / The collateral menu+

Feeds into: skills, templates, and the routing table

  1. REQPick from the catalog: print, web, email, presentations, social, business documents, sales and ops
  2. REQThe first three pieces you need on day one. These become the reference gold standards, built first
10 / Modules and infrastructure+

Feeds into: optional modules and integrations

  1. Website: keep existing, rebuild inside the brain, or none
  2. A content and SEO engine, yes or no
  3. Partner or account kits, and the list of accounts
  4. Team size, which selects the workflow-zone variant
  5. Meeting and transcript filing
  6. Accounts that exist: repository, hosting, workspace, CRM, email sender. Credentials are never collected on a form, dashboard-only, as a rule
11 / History+

Feeds into: the memory layer

  1. Decisions already locked, which the AI must not reopen
  2. Known unknowns, seeded straight into the questions register
  3. In-flight work: campaigns, launches, deadlines
The intake as a resourceDownload the question list

From the writing

Go a little deeper.

Related essays and field notes now have pages of their own.

ESSAY · 6 MIN

The intake form is the product

The first artifact of an AI engagement is not a model or a demo. It is a structured set of questions, sixty fields, each one mapped to the file it produces. And every question left unanswered becomes a tracked item instead of a guess.

Read →FIELD NOTE · 2 MIN

Never ask a client to organize their knowledge. Give them a shape.

The intake trick that makes non-technical owners succeed on the first try: build every folder in advance and let the structure do the sorting.

Read →
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