---
title: "Brain"
description: "Clean company chat backed by cited institutional memory, reviewable source ingestion, and reusable workspace integrations."
---

# Brain

Brain is clean company chat backed by cited institutional memory. People ask
plain-English questions; Brain answers from approved company knowledge with
links back to the Slack thread, meeting, transcript, issue, or webhook capture
that supports the answer.

Brain ingests approved Slack channels, Clips recordings, Granola Team-space
notes, GitHub issues/PRs, and generic transcript/webhook payloads. It stores raw
captures, distills durable facts/decisions/processes, and routes sensitive or
low-confidence memories through review before they become company knowledge.

The product surface stays simple on purpose: **Ask** is the primary chat
experience, while **Sources**, **Review**, and **Knowledge** are admin/support
surfaces for connecting data, approving proposals, and inspecting cited memory.

<Diagram id="doc-block-1blji0z" title="From source to cited answer" summary="Brain ingests approved sources into raw captures, distills durable memory, gates it through review, and only then answers with citations.">

```html
<div class="diagram-flow">
  <div class="diagram-card">
    <span class="diagram-pill">Sources</span
    ><small class="diagram-muted"
      >Slack · Granola · GitHub · Clips · webhooks</small
    >
  </div>
  <div class="diagram-arrow diagram-muted" aria-hidden="true">&rarr;</div>
  <div class="diagram-box" data-rough>
    Raw captures<br /><small class="diagram-muted">deduped, redacted</small>
  </div>
  <div class="diagram-arrow diagram-muted" aria-hidden="true">&rarr;</div>
  <div class="diagram-box" data-rough>
    Distill<br /><small class="diagram-muted"
      >facts · decisions · processes</small
    >
  </div>
  <div class="diagram-arrow diagram-muted" aria-hidden="true">&rarr;</div>
  <div class="diagram-card">
    <span class="diagram-pill warn">Review</span
    ><small class="diagram-muted">sensitive / low-confidence queue</small>
  </div>
  <div class="diagram-arrow diagram-muted" aria-hidden="true">&rarr;</div>
  <div class="diagram-box" data-rough>
    <span class="diagram-pill ok">Knowledge</span
    ><small class="diagram-muted">approved, atomic</small>
  </div>
  <div class="diagram-arrow diagram-muted" aria-hidden="true">&rarr;</div>
  <div class="diagram-panel center">
    <span class="diagram-pill accent">Ask</span
    ><small class="diagram-muted">cited answer</small>
  </div>
</div>
```

```css
.diagram-flow {
  display: flex;
  align-items: center;
  gap: 10px;
  flex-wrap: wrap;
}
.diagram-flow .diagram-card {
  display: flex;
  flex-direction: column;
  gap: 4px;
  padding: 10px 12px;
}
.diagram-flow .diagram-box {
  display: flex;
  flex-direction: column;
  gap: 4px;
}
.diagram-flow .diagram-arrow {
  font-size: 20px;
  line-height: 1;
}
.diagram-flow .center {
  display: flex;
  flex-direction: column;
  align-items: center;
  gap: 4px;
}
```

</Diagram>

<WireframeBlock id="doc-block-9napv7">
  <Screen
    surface="desktop"
    html={
      "<div style='display:flex;flex-direction:column;gap:14px;padding:18px;min-height:520px;box-sizing:border-box'><div style='display:flex;align-items:center;gap:10px'><h1 style='margin:0'>Ask company memory</h1><span class='wf-pill accent'>42 approved memories</span><span class='wf-pill'>3 sources</span><div style='flex:1'></div><button>Sources</button><button>Review</button></div><div class='wf-card' style='display:flex;align-items:center;gap:10px'><span data-icon='search' aria-label='Search'></span><strong style='flex:1'>Why did we choose usage pricing?</strong><button class='primary'>Ask</button></div><div class='wf-card' style='display:flex;flex-direction:column;gap:10px'><strong>Answer</strong><p style='margin:0'>The team chose usage pricing after pilots showed seat counts undercounted automation value.</p><div style='display:flex;gap:8px;flex-wrap:wrap'><span class='wf-pill accent'>Pricing RFC</span><span class='wf-pill'>Launch retro</span><span class='wf-pill'>Sales notes</span></div></div><div class='wf-card' style='flex:1;display:flex;flex-direction:column;gap:8px'><strong>Source timeline</strong><div class='wf-box'>May 3 · Decision captured</div><div class='wf-box'>May 8 · Customer evidence added</div><div class='wf-box'>May 12 · Legal note approved</div></div></div>"
    }
  />
</WireframeBlock>

When you open the app, **Ask** is front and center — a clean chat over reviewed
company memory. **Sources**, **Review**, and **Knowledge** sit alongside it as
admin surfaces for connecting data, approving proposals, and inspecting cited
entries.

## When to pick it

Use Brain when your team wants agents to answer questions like "why did we make
this product decision?", "how does this in-development feature work?", or "what
changed in this process?" with links back to the source conversation, meeting,
or issue.

Brain and Dispatch are complementary but do different jobs:

- **Brain owns company memory.** It ingests sources, reviews raw captures,
  distills durable facts/decisions/processes, answers from cited evidence, and
  exposes approved knowledge to agents.
- **Dispatch owns the workspace control plane.** It centralizes messaging,
  secrets, recurring jobs, approvals, A2A orchestration, and the distribution
  and approval of workspace-wide resources.

In a multi-app workspace, Dispatch can route a question to Brain over A2A and
can grant Brain shared provider credentials. Brain remains the specialist for
approved source ingestion, review, retrieval, and cited Company Brain answers.
Brain exposes read-only, citation-backed retrieval as its public A2A capability
so Dispatch and sibling apps can ask company-memory questions — the A2A agent
card is public discovery metadata, while retrieval still happens inside Brain's
authenticated action surface.

## What you can do with it

- **Ask cited questions.** Ask is the main product surface: a clean chat over
  reviewed company memory. Every answer links back to the Slack thread,
  meeting, issue, or capture that supports it, and Brain says so honestly when
  nothing supports an answer instead of guessing. See
  [Asking, Citations & Knowledge](/docs/template-brain-knowledge).
- **Connect approved sources.** Configure manual, generic webhook, Clips,
  Slack, Granola, and GitHub sources, with a guided safe rollout for Slack.
  See [Connecting & Reviewing Sources](/docs/template-brain-sources).
- **Review before publishing.** Sensitive or low-confidence proposals queue for
  human review before they become knowledge the whole company can be told as
  fact. See [Asking, Citations & Knowledge](/docs/template-brain-knowledge).
- **Check source and system health.** An Ops view tracks sync freshness and
  distillation queue health across every source. See
  [Connecting & Reviewing Sources](/docs/template-brain-sources).
- **Answer across the whole workspace.** Brain can hand off a live-data
  question — a metric, a mailbox, a workspace grant — to the specialist app
  that owns it, and sibling apps can ask Brain for cited answers over A2A. See
  [Talking to the Agent & Cross-App Use](/docs/template-brain-agent).

## Getting started

Live demo: [brain.agent-native.com](https://brain.agent-native.com).

1. **Try the demo.** Open Ask and choose **Start demo**. Brain seeds a small
   product-decision corpus, runs the trust checks, and asks a cited question so
   you can see answers, citations, review, and not-found behavior before adding
   real company data.
2. **Add one source.** Start with a single Slack channel, Granola Team-space
   feed, GitHub repository, Clips export, or generic transcript webhook. Keep
   the scope small until citations and review quality look right.
3. **Review before publishing.** Inspect evidence, edit wording, and approve
   only durable company memory.
4. **Ask from the source.** Use Ask for questions that should be grounded in
   approved knowledge, not raw chat logs.

For a public demo, the seeded corpus demonstrates product-decision recall,
citation links, supersede behavior, review gating, redaction, personal-content
exclusion, and honest not-found behavior without connecting a real workspace.

### Quick start

```bash
npx @agent-native/core@latest create my-brain --standalone --template brain
```

See [Getting Started](/docs/getting-started) for running it locally, and the
[Developer Guide](/docs/template-brain-developers) for the data model and full
action reference.

## What's next

- [**Connecting & Reviewing Sources**](/docs/template-brain-sources) — adding
  a source, the Slack safe rollout, and checking source health
- [**Asking, Citations & Knowledge**](/docs/template-brain-knowledge) — Ask,
  Search, browsing Knowledge, and reviewing proposals
- [**Talking to the Agent & Cross-App Use**](/docs/template-brain-agent) —
  useful prompts, cross-app answers, and A2A
- [**Developer Guide**](/docs/template-brain-developers) — data model, the
  full action reference, and how to customize Brain
- [**Dispatch**](/docs/dispatch) — the workspace control plane
- [**Dispatch template**](/docs/template-dispatch) — the scaffolded coordination app
- [**A2A Protocol**](/docs/a2a-protocol) — cross-app delegation
- [**Templates**](/docs/cloneable-saas) — the Cloneable SaaS model, and every other domain template to start from
- [**Getting Started**](/docs/getting-started) — the framework fundamentals: actions, application state, and live sync