FAQ
Questions, answered plainly
You're being careful. Good. That's the right instinct with anything that touches your business. Here's what we'd want to know, answered the way we'd want it answered.
A private AI chief of staff. It builds a structured, verified memory of your business from your own documents and conversations, then uses it to answer questions and produce work grounded in your real facts: sources on demand, gaps named instead of invented. It runs locally, on your own machine, inside the AI app you already use. The more you work with it, the more it knows.
A structured model of your business: the kinds of things you deal with (clients, projects, commitments, deliverables) and how they connect. It's what lets your AI reason about your world instead of guessing. Generic AI has a vague sense of "a business in general." An ontology gives it the specific shape of your business, so its answers fit your actual work. You can buy the ontology on its own as a body of knowledge, or as part of Chief Staffer, where the engine puts it to work.
No. Your business memory lives on your own machine, and only there. There is no Chief Staffer cloud, no hosted account, no sync to our servers. We never host your data and we cannot see it. Your client work stays in your office, by architecture, not by a setting we could later change.
Four pieces you can combine. Ontology, $100 — the structured knowledge of your business, on its own. Chief Staffer, $300 — the full engine plus one specialization, which is the product most people want. Authoring, $200 — a Chief Staffer add-on that builds a custom memory from your own documents. Specialization, $50 each — add the areas of work you do. Priced against the work it does for you, not against other software. You bring your own AI tokens, so there is no usage markup from us. See pricing.
Chief Staffer runs inside your own AI app, using your own account with that AI provider. The AI usage is billed by them, directly to you, at their rates. We don't resell AI access or mark it up, and we never sit between you and your provider. So your total cost is the Chief Staffer price plus whatever your own AI usage runs, with no surprise middle layer.
It runs in your own AI app over MCP, the open standard those apps use to connect to tools. Today that includes Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, VS Code, Windsurf, and Goose, with more as they adopt the standard. You keep using the app you already know; Chief Staffer adds your business memory and grounded production underneath it.
A specialization tailors Chief Staffer to a kind of work: the document types, the structure, and the way a particular field operates. Software development is the first; consulting, advisory, and content production are expanding. Chief Staffer includes one, and you can add others for $50 each. If none fits your work closely enough, authoring lets you build your own.
Available now: Chief Staffer with specializations, the ontology on its own, and authoring as a premium add-on. Authoring works and produces real results, though it is hands-on rather than one-click polished. Coming: a smoother, more autonomous front door, where you point it at your documents and it builds your custom memory in a single command. We'd rather tell you plainly where the seam is than oversell it.
Generic AI chat doesn't know your business, and forgets every session, so you re-paste the same context and it still invents details. Chief Staffer keeps a verified memory of your actual clients, projects, and commitments, and produces work grounded in those facts, with sources on demand and gaps named rather than filled with guesses. It runs on your own machine, and it gets sharper the more you use it. Same AI you already use; it finally knows your business.