Brain, desk, keys.
Understand the three parts of an AI employee—and what to ask about each one.
An AI demo can make several different things look like one thing. A model writes an answer, a tool opens a file, and a system remembers what happened yesterday. Separating those parts makes the whole thing easier to judge.
Explain what you are buying, without learning a new vocabulary of product names.
The brain: what can reason about the task
The model is the part that interprets a request and produces a response. Think of a capable new hire arriving on their first morning. General ability is useful. It is not the same as knowing your customers, your current prices, or how you approve a refund.
When a demo looks impressive, ask what information the model was given. Was the correct answer already in a carefully prepared example? Can it handle an ordinary, messy request from your team?
You do not need to memorize model rankings to ask those questions. You need a few representative tasks and a clear definition of a good answer.
The desk: what makes a job possible
The desk is our shorthand for the system around the model: tools, working context, saved information, and the steps that keep a task moving. A useful desk makes it possible to find the source, work on it, check the result, and leave a record.
Imagine a dispatcher checking a quote. The desk might provide the incoming request, the current rate sheet, the customer’s terms, and a place to save a draft. If one of those is missing, a more capable model does not make the missing information appear.
Ask where unfinished work lives, what survives a new session, and how someone can inspect a result. “It remembers” is not enough. What is saved, who can change it, and how does it know when a saved fact is out of date?
The keys: what it is allowed to reach
A connection to a tool is not a single permission. Reading a record, changing it, and sending it to a customer have different consequences.
- Read: find an approved document or inspect a record.
- Prepare: create a draft or proposed change for someone to review.
- Act: change a live record or communicate outside the team.
Even reading needs boundaries. The right to access a company tool should not imply the right to read every person’s private files. Decide which information the task needs and whose permission governs it.
Put the three parts back together
For a quote-preparation task, the brain interprets the request. The desk brings in current terms and creates a draft. The keys determine which sources it can read and whether it can send the quote.
This is a teaching model, not a claim that every product has three separate components. Its value is the questions it gives you. If a vendor cannot explain a missing source, a failed task, or an approval boundary, you have found something to investigate before rollout.
Try it with your work.
Pick one task your team does repeatedly. Write down the judgment it requires, the information it needs, and the actions it must not take without review.
Use the workflow worksheetCheck your understanding
A draft uses last year’s customer terms. Should your first move be to upgrade the model?
Show the answer
First inspect the source and how it was selected. The model may be reasoning from the wrong information. Fix the source, ownership, and freshness checks before assuming model capability is the problem.
Ontara Academy · Written lesson · 2026-10-19.