VANDAMJudgment Vault
Your expert’s decisions.A guide others can use.
A documented decision guide built from one person’s experience. Your team receives the rules, reference cases and explanations behind recurring decisions, with clear boundaries for when to act and when to ask.
$16,000 four weeks · per decision maker
Northwind wants 18% off for a two-year term.
Northwind Supply · tier B account · two years, 1,800 cases a year, net 30
-
Is the discount inside the account’s price band?
18% asked · tier B band goes to 8%
noyesUse the approved price.Sales quotes it
-
Are volume, term and payment on record?
Two years · 1,800 cases a year · net 30
yesnoClarify before quoting.Sales asks the customer
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Does the margin stay above the 22% floor?
Margin at 18% off: 19.5%
noyesApprove, with the term in the contract.Sales signs off
-
Ask the pricing owner.Dana decides
Ask the pricing owner.
Three questions · 18% is past the band and under the floor
A two-year term is worth something, but not eighteen points. I usually meet them at twelve and put the term in writing. Anything past that, I want to see before it goes out.
Dana Whitfield, commercial lead, in the guide
Rests on Halden Supply, May 2025: asked 15% on a three-year term, approved at 11% with the term in the contract.
The best judgment in the company sits with a few people.
- 15%
- more issues resolved per hour when 5,172 support agents got an AI assistant trained on their top performers. The least experienced gained most.
NBER, Brynjolfsson, Li and Raymond. - 11,200
- Americans turn 65 every day from 2024 through 2027, more than 4.1 million a year. Peak 65 research, Alliance for Lifetime Income.
This is the actual bottleneck. The models are smart enough already. What is missing is the company-specific context locked in senior people heads.
Y CombinatorMay 2026Source So no, waiting for the next model won’t help. Your expert’s past cases will.
Keep the reasoning in the business.
Some decisions keep landing on one desk: a price exception, a credit request, a supplier nobody has used before. The person at that desk knows which two details matter. Everyone else only sees the answer, so the next similar request starts the same conversation again, and the work waits whenever that person is away.
We sit with that person and go through real past decisions until the reasoning is on paper: what they checked, what made the exception different, where they would refuse. Part of the job is cutting. Some habits are real judgment and some are workarounds for a system that broke years ago, and only the first kind belongs in the guide. What remains becomes a guide colleagues can read and instructions an AI system can follow within agreed limits. The unusual cases still go to the expert.
If you just capture it and encode it into the agent, you’ve automated the dysfunction.Ahmad Kakar, CEO of Euclid, quoted by 
Annelies Gamble of Zetta Venture Partners, June 2026
Judgment Vault builds on your company brain: the expert’s decisions become rulings in it, next to the policies they apply.
What the team opens before deciding.
A decision library with one entry per recurring decision. Each entry holds the rules, the information that must be on record first, the reference cases behind each rule and the point where someone has to ask. A colleague reads it in a few minutes and knows what to do with the request in front of them.
The expert sees the other side: the cases where the guide and their own decision differ, each with both answers and the reason. A correction goes into the guide as a rule or an exception, and every reference case is run again before the change is used.
What every guide is made of.
The decisions are your expert’s. The way we write them down stays the same.
Decision library
One entry per recurring decision, with its rules, examples and owner.
Required information
What must be on record before anyone decides, and what to ask for when it is missing.
Reference cases
Real past decisions kept as tests, each with the reason the expert gave.
Escalation points
The amounts and situations where a colleague stops and asks the expert.
Agent skills
Instructions an AI system follows within the same limits as the team.
Test run
The guide compared against known decisions, with every disagreement reviewed with the expert.
Decision record
The interviews, the reasoning, the owner of each rule and the habits we left out.
Supervision plan
Who checks which decisions in the first weeks, and what has to be true before a boundary moves.
From experience to a working guide.
Review real decisions
We interview the decision maker using previous cases. We record the information considered, the reason for the answer, and what made an exception different from an ordinary request.
Case 041 · credit request - Customer
- Harbor Foods, 6 years
- Asked
- $120k limit, up from $80k
- Looked at
- Payment days, order trend, owner change
- Decision
- Approved at $100k
- Why the exception
- Pays in 21 days; the new owner is the old CFO
Write and test the guide
We turn that material into rules, examples and escalation points. Then we compare the guide against known decisions and review disagreements with the expert before it is used.
Guide vs. known decisions Guide saysExpert decided
- Approve $100kApproved $100k
- DeclineDeclined
- EscalateApproved $60k
38 of 40 match. 2 under review.
Introduce it with supervision
Your team starts with the guide under agreed supervision. You receive the decision library, test cases and ownership record, including the circumstances in which someone must ask for judgment.
Supervised use, week 2 - Requests under $50kteam decides
- $50k to $150kguide + check
- Above $150kask the expert
- New customer, no historyask the expert
Written in four weeks.
Kept current after that.
You own the guide, the cases and the skills. Customers, prices and the expert’s own thinking keep changing, so after handover we can stay on for a monthly fee to keep the guide and its tests in step.
New cases
Requests that went to the expert are added as reference cases, so the guide learns from them.
Retesting
Every rule change is run against all reference cases before your team uses it.
Boundary review
The escalation points are reviewed against the record, and they move only when the cases support it.
Expert sessions
A monthly session with the expert on disagreements, new exceptions and decisions to add next.
What you
receive.
Decision library
Readable guidance and tested agent skills.
Reference cases
Past decisions retained as repeatable tests.
Decision record
The interviews, reasoning and ownership of each rule.
Where the vault leads.
Each next step has its own service.
Company Brain
Comes before: the policies and history the rulings sit next to.
$19,200
Agent Onboarding
Agents load the rulings for the decisions they help with.
$9,600 + $1,600/mo
Eval Suite
Tests agents against your expert’s reference cases on every new model.
$12,800
100×worker Program
Trains the next people on the decisions the vault holds.
$8,000
We can know more than we can tell.Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, 1966
Before you ask.
How much of the expert’s time does this take?
The interviews use real past cases, and the expert reviews every disagreement from the test run. We agree the sessions at the start so they fit around the expert’s normal work.
Will an AI make these decisions on its own?
Only within the boundaries agreed during the supervised start. Unusual cases and anything past an escalation point still go to the expert.
What happens when the guide and the expert disagree?
Every disagreement is reviewed with the expert before the guide is used. It ends as a new rule, a new exception or a corrected case, and the decision record notes which.
Can we cover more than one person?
Yes. Each decision maker is a separate project with their own interviews, cases and tests.