A generic AI persona does not know how your firm works
Built-in 'marketing expert' and 'legal assistant' personas sound capable and know nothing about your firm. Write your own role profiles instead.
3 min read Provecta Group
Most AI tools now offer a menu of ready-made experts. A marketing strategist. A financial analyst. A legal assistant. Pick one and the tone changes: more confident, more jargon, more frameworks. It feels like hiring someone.
It is closer to hiring a very articulate stranger who has read a lot of textbooks and has never seen your business. The generic marketing persona does not know you never publish prices. The generic legal assistant does not know which clauses your firm refuses to accept. The finance persona will happily produce a margin figure from numbers it assumed.
Last week we made a decision about this for our own work, and it is worth explaining because it applies well beyond AI.
What we decided
At Provecta Group we keep a written profile for each kind of specialist work the firm does: marketing, legal, finance, sales, operations, strategy and others. Each profile has two parts. One describes the job: what this function is responsible for, how it works, what good output looks like. The other is an advisor view: what an experienced person in that role would check, question or refuse.
On 14 October we made those profiles the default for every AI session and every scheduled agent that works in our company memory. When a task touches marketing, the session loads our marketing profile and its advisor before producing anything. On 15 and 16 October we tightened it: a built-in persona from any AI platform may run the work, but it never replaces our own profile as the source of instructions. And one line applies to all of them without exception: personas do not invent metrics, credentials, facts or decisions.
Why our own profiles and not the platform's
Three reasons.
They carry our rules. Our marketing profile sits alongside rules the firm has already written down, such as never naming staff in public material and the punctuation and voice rules every external draft has to pass. A platform persona has never heard of those.
They do not change underneath us. A vendor can update its built-in persona whenever it likes. Ours change when we change them, and every change is recorded.
They work on any model. The profiles are plain written files. They load the same way whichever AI tool or provider we use that week.
This is a management idea first
Strip out the AI and this is a familiar problem. A new hire arrives from a large firm with strong opinions about "how marketing is done". They are good. They are also wrong about half of how your firm does it, and they will stay wrong until someone writes the differences down.
Most firms never do. Job descriptions list responsibilities and skip the judgement: what this role should push back on, what it must check before signing off, what the firm has learned the hard way. That gap is why new people take months to become useful, and why a generic AI persona never does.
A role profile closes part of that gap for both. Here is the outline we would suggest:
- What the role owns. The outputs and decisions this function is responsible for.
- How we do it here. The firm's own methods, templates and preferences, especially where they differ from the textbook.
- What it must check. The questions an experienced person asks before anything leaves their desk.
- What it must never do. With the reason for each.
- Who it hands to. When the work crosses into another role's territory.
What a profile is not
A profile is an operating document. It is not a person, and we do not present our profiles as staff. A legal profile does not make an AI a lawyer, and nothing it produces replaces advice from a qualified one. A finance profile does not make numbers true. It only tells the session which questions to ask about them.
Profiles also go stale. The textbook part ages slowly. The "how we do it here" part changes every time the firm learns something, and if nobody updates it, the profile starts teaching last year's habits.
A small start
Choose the role where new people struggle longest to become useful. Write its profile on one page using the five headings above. Give it to the next person who joins that function, and load it into any AI tool doing that kind of work. Then ask both where it was wrong.
Book 20 minutes at pgco.world/book if you want help writing role profiles your team and your AI can both use.