There is no single right way to work with your company brain. There are three common paths, and they map to the role you are playing right now inside the one brain your organization uses. Pick the one that fits, follow it until it stops being useful, then look at the next path.
These are not three products. They are three roles a person grows through inside the same company brain. You can move between them as your work changes. The brain does not change. Only your relationship with it does.
Path 1: the curious newcomer
You just connected your AI to the company brain. You are not sure what to ask first. You want to feel it working by the end of today.
Five small steps, in order:
- Connect your AI once. Add the company brain to your AI client over MCP. You authenticate as yourself, and the brain shows you exactly what your role is allowed to see. Once connected, it is available in every chat.
- Ask three orienting questions. Open a chat with the brain connected. Ask "what does this company know about [a project you are on]?" Then "what were the decisions behind [something you inherited]?" Then "who owns [an area you need]?" The answers pull from real pages, not guesses.
- Make it cite its sources. After any answer, ask "which page did that come from?" The brain answers from specific pages and can point you at them. Reading the source page is how you learn where things live.
- Tell the brain who you are. Ask your AI to help you write or update your own person page: your role, what you own, the problems you want help with, how you like to work. From then on, answers are tuned to you.
- Make it a daily reflex. Before you ask a teammate or dig through a drive, ask the brain first. The habit is the whole point. Within a couple of weeks it is the fastest way to get context.
That is the whole newcomer arc. The brain becomes useful before you understand all of it. Do not skip step 4. A brain that knows who you are gives sharper answers to everyone, including future joiners reading about your area.
Path 2: the power user
You have been using the brain for a few weeks. Asking good questions feels natural. You want to give back to it and make it do more.
Five places to go deeper:
- Write pages back. When you finish something worth keeping (a decision, a process, a lesson), ask your AI to capture it as a page in the right department. The brain gets better because people like you feed it, not only because it was built once.
- Build a skill. A skill is a small saved procedure the AI runs on demand. "Summarise any meeting transcript into our format." "Draft the weekly update from this week's activity." "Extract action items from a thread." Ask your AI for an example, edit it, save it. You just gave the brain a new tool the whole team can use.
- Connect more of your tools. Your AI client has native integrations (Gmail, Calendar, Notion, Drive, Slack, GitHub, and more depending on the provider). Each one becomes an input the brain can draw on or an output it can write to. Start with one, use it for a week, add the next.
- Run things on a schedule. Move from "I ask the brain to do X" to "the brain does X every Monday." Weekly reports, recurring briefs, drafts you write repeatedly. Most AI clients have a scheduling feature.
- Read how the brain works under the hood. The how-it-works guide covers how your AI reaches the brain, the tool surface, and the Systems Registry. Knowing the mechanism makes you faster at everything above.
The power-user phase is where the brain stops being something you query and starts being something you shape. Skills and captured pages compound.
Path 3: the operator / admin
You are responsible for the company brain itself: its structure, who can see what, and keeping it true over time. You are not building a different product. You are governing the one the whole organization uses.
Four areas you own:
- Structure. The brain is organized into departments, each with a hub page that routes to what lives inside it. As the organization changes, you keep departments meaningful: add one when a real area appears, retire one that no longer maps to how the company works.
- Access. Access is role-based. Each person sees only what their role should see, and every read is enforced by the brain's MCP server, not by trust. You decide which roles reach which departments, and you review that as people join, move, and leave.
- Connectors. The brain draws on your real tools through connectors you approve (chat, docs, trackers, code). You decide what feeds the brain, keep those connections healthy, and cut off any that should no longer flow.
- Keeping it current. A brain that stops being fed goes stale quietly. Source Sweep is the recurring pass that pulls fresh material from your connected sources back into the brain so answers keep matching reality. You own the cadence.
If this is your role, your LAN contact and the operator surfaces in your dashboard are where the governance work happens. One brain, for the whole organization, kept honest by the people who run it.
Where to go for more
- How it works: the technical surface of how your AI reaches the brain, the tools it uses, and the Systems Registry.
- Best practices and health checks: the rhythms that keep a brain growing instead of rotting.
- The LAN docs (the source of truth): https://www.lanbrain.ai/docs
The methodology is alive. The docs online stay current as LAN ships updates.