From “ask Bertha” to a brain
the whole company can ask.
Onboarding is the product. There is no 40-field setup form and no wiki you're expected to fill in yourselves. Odell interviews your people, drafts their knowledge into cabinets, and puts a human approval step between everything it hears and anything it will ever answer.
How a company gets its brain.
The owner interview
It starts with you — a conversation, voice-first, not a form. Odell learns what the business does, how it's organized, and the critical map: who knows what, and who does everybody go to? The output is a proposed company structure and a roster of the people whose heads run the place.
Knowledge-holder interviews
Each person on the roster talks with Odell, with prompts shaped to their role. The service manager explains diagnostics and warranty callbacks. The office manager explains scheduling and billing. The estimator explains how a quote actually gets built. Each conversation becomes that person's cabinet — drafted by Odell, in their words.
The approval pass
Nothing Odell drafts is live. Entries sit in a queue until the owner — or the cabinet's owner, your call — approves, edits, or rejects them. What gets approved is what Odell can answer from. What doesn't, never surfaces.
Document load
Handbooks, manuals, price sheets, spec documents: Odell reads them, classifies them into the right cabinet, extracts the knowledge, and diffs it against what's already there. Duplicates and disagreements are surfaced, not silently merged. Originals are always preserved — your documents stay your documents.
Feeds that keep it current
Prices, part numbers, and catalogs change — so cabinets connect to the sources that change them. Supplier price feeds flow in on a schedule; calendars connect read-only, permission-scoped like everything else, so Odell can answer “what's on Thursday?” only from calendars the asker may see. Prices can auto-apply; policies always propose-and-approve.
Employee access — and their own cabinets
Every employee gets a login, a role, and access to the cabinets their job needs — plus a cabinet of their own, seeded by a short interview. A new hire can ask everyone who came before them, on day one, at 2 a.m., without waking anybody up.
One box. Plain words. A cited answer.
An employee types — or says — a question. Odell checks which cabinets that employee may open, reads only those, and answers from approved entries, naming the cabinet and the source: the interview, the document page, the feed record.
Documents work the same way in reverse: ask for the paper and Odell hands it over — the bond rider, the insurance certificate, the spec sheet — if, and only if, that employee is allowed to open it.
“Ballistic panels sell at $225 per square foot; doors are priced the same. No minimum job charge — small jobs quote at the normal rate.”
Honest gaps, routed to the right person
Odell never improvises. If the answer isn't in an approved entry the asker may open, it says “I don't know that yet” — and the question becomes a gap ticket, routed to the cabinet owner who should know. Their answer, once approved, fills the gap permanently.
And when two sources disagree, Odell doesn't pick a winner:
One document says the panel warranty is 7 years; another says 10. Odell leads with the flag, treats the fact as unsettled, and only an approved person — the owner — can settle which document is right. The decision is written onto the entry and into the log.
Simple in front. Heavy behind.
- Voice, both ways. Talk to Odell; Odell talks back. Interviews are voice-first because people explain things out loud better than they type them.
- Typing. For desks, quiet rooms, and quick checks from a phone.
- Upload. PDFs and documents file straight into the ingestion flow.
- Email-in. Every company gets an address; forward a document and it's filed, classified, and proposed — emailed knowledge still passes the approval queue.
The design law is strict: big, clean buttons; no manual required; if the owner needs help to set a permission, the design failed. The machinery underneath — retrieval, permissions, versioning, audit — can be as sophisticated as it needs to be. None of it leaks into the screens.