What your company knows
becomes the asset once agents do the work.

A renewal agent proposes a 20% discount. Company policy caps renewal discounts at 10% unless someone approves a service-impact exception. The agent pulls three severe incidents from the on-call system, an open “cancel unless fixed” escalation from the support desk and last quarter’s renewal thread, where a VP signed off on a similar exception. It sends the request to Finance, and Finance approves. When the work is done, the CRM holds one fact: “20% discount.”

The example comes from an essay by Jaya Gupta, a partner at Foundation Capital, written with Ashu Garg, a general partner at the same firm, and published in December 2025. I keep coming back to it because I see the same thing in every company I work with. The systems keep the outcome. The incidents, the threat to cancel, the precedent and the person who said yes all stay in a chat thread, a call and somebody’s memory. Next year, when the same customer asks for the same discount, nobody can tell whether 20% was a one-off or the new rule.

For most of the history of the modern company, that loss was tolerable. The person who granted the exception was still around, and the colleague handling the next one could walk over and ask. Once agents do a large share of the work, that hallway stops existing. An agent has what it can read, and nothing more.

The record keeps the answer and loses the reason

Gupta and Garg call the missing material decision traces: “the exceptions, overrides, precedents, and cross-system context that currently live in Slack threads, deal desk conversations, escalation calls, and people’s heads.” They separate two kinds of knowledge an agent needs. Rules “tell an agent what should happen in general.” Decision traces “capture what happened in this specific case,” including which policy applied, who granted the exception and which earlier case it followed.

Their list of what goes missing reads like a tour of any mid-sized company. A sales rule that exists only as habit, such as an extra 10% for healthcare customers “because their procurement cycles are brutal.” A deal structured to match one from last quarter, with nothing linking the two. A support lead who checks revenue, open escalations and a worried chat thread before escalating a ticket, after which the ticket says only “escalated to Tier 3.” A VP who approves a discount on a video call, so the record shows the price and never the approval.

The reasoning connecting data to action was never treated as data in the first place.Jaya Gupta and Ashu Garg, Foundation Capital, December 2025

Their essay is written for founders, and its conclusion is about which software companies will own this layer. My interest is narrower. Whoever sells the software, the reasons behind your decisions belong to your company, and today most companies throw them away by default.

Agents only know what someone wrote down

Eli Mernit, founder of Beam, wrote the most literal version of this idea in February, in a post called “Your Company is a Filesystem.” He imagines a law firm as a set of folders: a new case is written to /cases, logged time goes to /billing/time-sheet, and “permissions naturally map to seniority in the org chart.” An agent working in that firm can read and write whatever it needs. The trouble he names is that real companies keep things everywhere: “Invoices are in Quickbooks, emails are in Outlook, proposals live in Sharepoint.” He also concedes the harder point, that “many work streams are codified in people’s heads - not in JSON files.”

Connecting the systems is the part most AI projects already budget for. The heads are where projects stall, and the most detailed evidence I know of comes from a company that has gone further down this road than anyone. In its October study of its own workforce, Anthropic reports that written standing instructions for its agents grew from a few hundred in July 2025 to 8,500 a year later. Its conclusion about everything that was not written down is blunt: “Private work, in unlogged meetings and direct messages, is invisible, confusing and discouraged in an AI-heavy workplace.” And the reason given is the same one Gupta gives: “Keeping human work visible across the company ensures autonomous agents reason from fresh context.”

Eight and a half thousand instructions in one year means people spent real working time writing down how they wanted things done. That writing is now part of how the company runs. It is also an asset the company did not have two years ago, and nobody outside the company has a copy of it.

Context is what stays when people and models change

Greg Isenberg, CEO of the studio Late Checkout, sketched the new org chart in August as a small layer of people on top “doing strategy, creative, and judgment,” with a wide layer of agents underneath. His line about what that means for managers is the one I quote most: “Managing people became managing agents, and managing agents is really just managing context.”

Both humans/agents come and go, the context is the thing that compounds and can’t be copied.

The compounding is concrete. Every model a company uses will be replaced within a year or two, and it should be. The agents get rebuilt on whatever comes next. People change roles and leave. What carries over is the record of how the business decides: which customers get exceptions, which suppliers are trusted and why, where the line sits between a call a junior can make and one that goes to the owner. Isenberg made the same point about agent software a month later: “every correction a human makes becomes a rule the harness keeps.” A company that captures those corrections gets better each quarter. A company that lets them evaporate starts over each time a person leaves or a system is replaced.

Compounding works in both directions, and I would be careless to skip that. A record full of workarounds compounds the workarounds. Ahmad Kakar, CEO of Euclid, told Annelies Gamble of Zetta Venture Partners that a considerable part of tribal knowledge is “workarounds people built for non-existent or broken systems,” and that the job is “deciding what was real judgment versus scar tissue.” Stale context does similar damage. An instruction nobody owns stays in force long after the reason for it is gone, and an agent follows it with complete confidence. So the record worth having is curated, owned and dated, which means someone decides what stays out of it.

What I would start writing down this month

Gupta and Garg write that “none of this requires full autonomy on day one,” and the same goes for software. A company can start with a habit and a shared place for it to land. These are the four things I ask teams to capture first, in this order, because each one is cheap to record at the moment it happens and expensive to reconstruct later.

1. Decisions with their reasons. One paragraph per decision that changes how work is done: what was decided, what was considered and rejected, and what fact would make you decide differently.
2. Exceptions, with who approved them and why. The discount above the cap, the late payment that was waived, the supplier allowed in without the usual checks. Exceptions are where the real policy lives, and they are the first thing an agent gets wrong.
3. Owners for every rule and instruction. A name and a review date on each one, so that a rule which no longer holds has someone whose job it is to remove it.
4. Answers that cite their source. When someone, or something, answers a question about how the company works, the answer links to the document or decision it came from. That is how people learn to trust the record, and how they spot the parts that are out of date.

This is also how we build at VANDAM. A Company Brain answers everyday questions from the documents, emails and decisions a company chooses, with each answer linked to its source, so the third and fourth items have somewhere to live. A Judgment Vault starts with one person whose decisions keep landing on their desk, works through their past cases until the reasoning is on paper, and separates real judgment from old workarounds before anything reaches an agent. Both start from the same view: the reasons are the valuable part, and they have to be collected while the people who hold them are still in the room.

If you want a quick test of where your company stands, take the last three exceptions someone granted this month and try to find out why each one was approved without asking the person who approved it. In most companies I have seen, you will find the outcome in a system within a minute and the reason nowhere at all. That gap is the first thing to close before agents start making those calls on their own.