Brain
Asking the Brain
Search finds matching pages; asking synthesises an answer from them, with the pages it used and — just as importantly — what it could not find.
A knowledge base earns its keep when it is questioned. Brain’s composer has two ways to do that, and they are not the same move.
Search, and ask
| Mode | What you get |
|---|---|
| Search the brain | Every matching page, ranked, by keyword or meaning |
| Ask the brain | An answer synthesised from your pages, with citations |
Use search when you know a page exists and want to open it. Use ask when the answer spans several pages, or when you do not know whether it exists at all.
Answers are built only from your team’s own pages. If nothing covers the question, you are told that, rather than being handed a fluent guess.
Citations, and gaps
Every answer arrives with two things:
The pages it used. Open them and check. For anything consequential — a policy, a number, a commitment to a customer — this is not optional diligence, it is the point of having citations.
What it could not find. The gap list is the most valuable output the brain produces. A repeated gap is not a bug report; it is a writing queue. Ask, see the gap, write the page, ask again.
Asking from inside your work
You do not have to be on the Brain page:
- In any task, the assistant searches the brain before answering questions about your organisation, and lists the pages it looked at on the reply — see Company knowledge
- AI staff connected to a brain use the same retrieval in unattended runs, and are told to say when the search came back empty rather than answering from memory
- Your own apps can search it too, for signed-in workspace members — see What your app can use
Asking well
Ask the question, not for the document. “What is our refund window for annual plans?” retrieves better than “find the refunds page”.
Include the qualifier that matters. Annual or monthly, Nepal or overseas, before or after the 2024 revision — the qualifier is usually what separates two pages that both look relevant.
Ask the questions you expect to be asked. The fastest way to find out whether your brain is any good is to run the five questions new joiners ask and see how many come back with a citation.
Believe the empty answer. “Nothing in the brain covers this” is the system working. It is also the moment to write the page, while you still know the answer.