Write the onboarding pack once, for new hires and your AI

Think about the last person you hired. What did they get on day one?

In a lot of firms the answer is a laptop, a login, a tour of the office and the name of someone to ask. The real onboarding happens over the next three months, one question at a time. "Who approves this?" "Which template do we use?" "Do we call this client or email them?" Each answer comes from whoever is nearest. Some of those answers are slightly different from what the owner would have said.

Now think about the AI tools your team started using this year. What did they get on day one?

Usually less than the new hire. No tour, no person to ask. Just whatever someone types into the prompt that morning.

The two lists are almost the same

If you wrote down everything a new operations coordinator needs to know to do good work in their first month, you would get something like this:

1. What the company does, for whom, and what it does not do.
2. The main customers and anything special about them.
3. Prices, terms and the rules for exceptions.
4. Who decides what, and who to ask about what.
5. How we write to customers, and the phrases we avoid.
6. The tools we use and where things live.
7. The handful of mistakes that cause real trouble here.

Now write down what an AI assistant needs to know before it drafts a customer email, summarises a call or prepares a quote. It is the same list. The order might differ, and the AI needs it every single time instead of once, but the content is the same.

That overlap is the useful part. A firm that wants to "give the AI context" tends to write a special prompt for it. A firm that wants to onboard people better writes a handbook. It is easy to end up writing the same document twice, or more often, writing neither properly.

One document, two readers

Write the onboarding pack as a set of short pages, one per topic from the list above. Keep each page to what someone needs to act, not the history of how it came to be. Put a date and an owner on each.

Then use it both ways. A new hire reads it in week one and comes back to it when stuck. Your AI tools read it, or the relevant pages, before each task. In some tools that means attaching the pages to a project. In others it means pasting the right page into the prompt. Either way, a person and a model are now working from the same version of how your company works.

The benefit runs in both directions. When the AI gets something wrong because a page was unclear, you fix the page, and the next new hire gets the clearer version. When a new hire asks a question the pages did not answer, you add the answer, and every AI task after that has it too.

At Provecta our AI working sessions start by reading a company context file and our written standards before anything else. That is very close to what we would hand a new team member on day one.

A digression about recipe cards

Busy restaurant kitchens have dealt with a version of this for a long time. A dish has to taste the same whichever cook makes it, on whichever shift, so many kitchens keep recipe cards with exact quantities and steps. The head chef still tastes the plate. The card does not replace judgement. It just means the judgement starts from the same place every time, instead of from whatever the cook remembers.

What the pack will not cover

Judgement does not fit on a page. How to read an upset customer, when to bend a rule, which battles are worth fighting with a supplier. New hires learn that from watching people. AI tools should mostly not be making those calls at all, and your pages should say so: "If a customer is threatening to leave, pass to the account owner."

The pack also has to be maintained, and that is where most of them die. The owner of each page needs to re-read it on a schedule, monthly for prices and terms, quarterly for the rest.

Ask your most recent hire to list the ten questions they asked most in their first month. Write a short answer to each, in plain language, and group them under the seven topics above.

Give that document to your next new hire on day one. Give it to your AI tools today.

See where everyday process gaps are slowing your team at pgco.world/tools/operations-drag, or book 20 minutes at pgco.world/book.