Turn your policies and SOPs into a knowledge base your AI agents cite
The company brain is the searchable, permission-aware index Ascend builds from your own policies, SOPs and handbooks, and the source its AI agents for onboarding, training and Q&A draw on and cite.
Your documents, as they are, scoped as you choose.
An administrator uploads the documents that already define how your organization works: the employee handbook, the SOPs for each function, the compliance policies. They do not need reformatting first. Each upload is read, split into passages and indexed, and the page shows how many passages it produced.
- Supported files are Word (.docx), PowerPoint (.pptx), PDF, Markdown and plain text, up to 25MB each.
- Word and PowerPoint headings are kept, so passages follow the document's own sections. PDFs carry no heading structure, so they are split by length instead.
- Every upload needs an explicit audience: the whole company, one department, or an access role. The form starts at the uploader's own department when they have one, not at everyone.
- Adding documents is limited to administrators. Anyone else can write a note, and a note reaches the brain only after an administrator has read and verified it. Editing a verified note takes it back out until it is verified again.
Permissions are enforced on every passage, not on the page.
A knowledge base that answers questions is only safe if it respects who may read what. In Ascend, the audience you set on a document is copied onto every passage cut from it, and the database itself filters passages by the asking person's department, access role and identity before anything is searched, rather than leaving it to application code.
- When an employee asks the assistant a question, it searches only the passages that person is allowed to see, and answers only from what it found.
- When a reviewer opens a drafted training block, each cited source is checked against that reviewer's own access. A source they cannot see is shown as cited, without its text.
- Search combines exact terms, which matter for policy numbers and acronyms, with meaning, which matters when a question is worded differently from the policy. Results are then re-ranked before anything is used.
| Question | Shared drive or intranet search | Ascend company brain |
|---|---|---|
| How does someone find the rule? | Search by file name or keyword, open the document, read until they find it. | Ask in plain words and get an answer with the passage it came from. |
| Who can see it? | Folder permissions, which a copied file or a broad search can step around. | An audience set on every document and enforced on every passage by the database. |
| What if nothing answers the question? | A list of loosely related files, or nothing. | The assistant says it could not find a grounded answer, and the question goes to an administrator's review queue. |
| Two versions of the same SOP? | Both sit side by side, and nobody is told. | A daily check flags documents that look like copies of each other, for an administrator to decide. |
| Which skills have no written material? | Invisible until someone tries to train on them. | A coverage view lists the skills and job roles no document mentions by name. |
| Where does training content come from? | Someone copies text from the policy into slides. | Drafts cite the passages they were written from, and a block with no source material is held for a person instead of written anyway. |
The brain is what the AI agents cite, and what they refuse to guess without.
- The onboarding agent retrieves passages about the job role when it drafts a 30/60/90-day plan, and records which passages each plan item drew on.
- The training agent drafts each block from retrieved passages and records which ones it used. A reviewer sees those sources beside the block.
- When retrieval finds nothing for a module, Ascend does not ask a model to fill the gap. It saves a placeholder marked as having no source material and holds it for review. Material that only partly covers a module is marked as thinly sourced.
- In a simulation, the scorer reads the policy passages the training block cited, so a learner is judged against your wording rather than a model's general idea of good practice.
- The assistant answers employee questions from the brain, with citations, and logs any answer it could not ground for an administrator to follow up.
Asking the brain is a read, so it runs at every autonomy setting. It searches as the person asking, never as an administrator.
- “What's our policy on parental leave?”Any employee. The AI assistant searches only the passages that person is allowed to see and answers with the sources it used. If it cannot ground an answer, it says so and the question lands in an administrator's escalation queue.
- “What notes do I have access to?”Lists the notes the person asking is allowed to view, and nothing beyond that.
- “What skills do we track?”Lists the skill catalog, which is what the brain's coverage check measures your documents against.
- “Add a skill called Incident triage.”Admins only. A skill cannot be deleted once created, so the assistant proposes it and waits for the admin to confirm unless training is on autopilot.
Performance review drafts deliberately do not read from the brain. Policies describe how the company works, not how one person performed, so review drafts are grounded in that person's own record instead.
A brain that tells you what it cannot ground.
Once a day Ascend checks the whole index and reports two things on the Company Brain page. Both are prompts for a person to look, not decisions Ascend makes for you.
- Coverage: for each skill and job role in your catalog, how many passages and documents mention it by name. A zero means no document uses that name, which is worth checking, since a policy that only ever writes an acronym will not match the full skill name.
- Look-alike documents: pairs whose passages closely overlap, such as an old and a new version of the same SOP. Ascend does not decide which one is current. An administrator confirms the pair or dismisses it, and naming which copy is out of date is optional. Every decision is written to the audit log.
What buyers ask about the company brain.
- Which systems does it connect to?
- Upload is how documents come in today. Connections for SharePoint and Microsoft Teams are built into the product but have not yet been run against a live Microsoft tenant, so we set them up with you during a pilot rather than list them as ready. No other connectors exist.
- What happens when we update a policy?
- Upload the new version and delete the old one; the daily look-alike check will also point out the pair if both are still there. Ascend does not yet trace a changed policy through to the programs and people that relied on the old version, and we will not claim it until it does.
- Can an employee see a document they should not?
- Not through Ascend's search or assistant. Access is checked on each passage in the database, against the audience set when the document was added.
What the brain feeds.
Bring one job role. We'll run the loop on it.
Thirty minutes, your own documents, one job role. You'll see the company brain built, the drafts it produces, the sources behind them, and where the autonomy dial sits before anything publishes.