A quote from March sits in one partner's inbox, the price list lives in a spreadsheet on the shared drive, and the reason you gave a client a discount is in somebody's head. That is where most companies keep what they know. A knowledge vault puts all of it in one indexed place: documents, mail, the ERP, the chat threads, meeting notes, and the house rules nobody wrote down until now.
Other names for the same thing: a company brain, an internal AI knowledge base, a second brain for the firm. The job is identical. Somebody asks a question in plain language and gets an answer with the documents it came from, so the answer can be checked in ten seconds.
A general chatbot starts every morning as a stranger to your company. The vault is built from your material and stays connected to it. When a new contract arrives, the vault knows it the same day. When an agent drafts a reply, it drafts from your price list and your tone, and it shows where it looked.
We build vaults for owner-run firms with 5 to 50 people: agencies, law and tax practices, engineering offices, trades with a back office, wholesalers. The common thread is know-how that lives in one or two heads and a team that keeps asking those heads the same questions.
The build starts with the sources. We connect the systems you already run, index them properly (the entities, the relationships, the claims inside each document), and put a harness around the model: what it may read, what it may write, who approves what. Then the first agents go to work from it. You own the result: the code, the prompts, the index and the data.
Limits we name up front. A vault is only as good as what you connect to it; a shared drive with three versions of every contract gives three answers until the versions are cleaned up. Answers arrive with sources so a person can check them, and for some questions that check stays necessary. And if your knowledge really does fit in one head and that head is staying, you do not need this yet. We say so on the call.
Questions we get asked
Where does the data live?
Where you decide. On your own server in your office (see our private AI page), on a European cloud account that belongs to you, or a mix of the two. Nothing is stored in a Joinery account.
How is this different from a ChatGPT team plan or Copilot?
Those tools answer from what you paste in at that moment. The vault is indexed once, updated continuously, connected to your systems, and every answer cites its sources. It also feeds the agents that do tasks for you, and it is yours to keep.
How long does it take?
A first working vault over one or two sources typically runs within weeks. The full build, with the harness and the first agents, is quoted after the call as a fixed price with milestones.
What happens when documents change?
The vault re-indexes on a schedule you set, and agents file what they learn back into it after each task. Nothing needs to be uploaded again by hand.