What Does AI Base Its Advice to Your Company On?

When you ask AI for advice about your company, what is it basing that advice on?

Every company has a set of basic facts:

• ✅ What are its starting assumptions—its hypothesis, mission, and vision?
• ✅ What do you want to do, and what do you want to avoid?
• ✅ Do you have any constraints, such as an owner's non-compete agreement or financial limits?
• ✅ Why should a customer choose your company?
• ✅ What principles guide sales and marketing?
• ✅ What rules must production and operations follow?
• ✅ What capabilities do you have in-house, and what do you need to buy?
• ✅ What are the owners like—their strengths and weaknesses?
• ✅ Are there values you want to uphold?
• ✅ And so on.

If you want to consult AI about your work, it needs these facts before you ask your question.

⚠️ Otherwise it advises an average company. Not yours. ⚠️

Don't rely on whatever AI happens to remember from previous conversations. That is unreliable. More importantly, you want the same rules to be respected across the company—from the director to the last person in the office. Anyone talking with AI should do so in the context of your company.

⚠️ And in a context the company has agreed on. ⚠️

That's what a written company constitution is for. It isn't marketing material, but an internal document that needs regular updates.

It doesn't have to be complicated. A folder of text files, ideally in a simple format such as Markdown, is enough. You can attach the files in a web chat such as ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. In a desktop app or command-line tool—for example ChatGPT, Claude Desktop, Codex CLI, Claude Code, or Gemini CLI—you can set up your workflow so the AI reads the files it needs before the conversation.

You don't have to describe every last detail of the company right away. Start with a few files covering the facts that have the greatest impact on your decisions. When you discover that the AI was missing an important assumption or constraint, add it. Your company constitution can grow as you actually use it.