Toby Mather described a mess most of the room seemed to recognise. Every team member has their own AI assistant, each plugged into different tools, and nobody uses the same definition for things like win rate. "Is anyone in that chaos today?" he asked.
Loads of hands went up.
Toby, co-founder of Rig, was talking at aiblLIVE in London on 20 October about building what people are starting to call a company brain. One place where AI agents can find the information they need and get the same answer every time. His message was the least glamorous of the day, and maybe the most important.
"The fun bit does happen last," he said. "So sort the really boring plumbing and then everything else will work great."
What the plumbing is
He laid out four steps, in order.
First, get everything into one place. Sales, customer support, email, meeting notes, all of it.
Second, agree what things mean: what counts as a win, what exactly churn is, and what makes someone a customer rather than a lead. Toby's point was that when his agent and an intern's agent both ask for the win rate, they should get the same number.
Third, decide who can see what, so the AI only shows people the data they're allowed to see.
Only then, step four: the agents, the apps and the impressive demos.
He was honest that most people want to skip straight to step four. As he put it, the permissions bit is "the sort of boring bit that no one wants to vibe code, but it has to happen."
Why shared definitions matter so much
Adam Boita, CMO of Ecologi, made a similar point earlier in the day. When his team worked out their customer churn figure with AI, it offered to save it to a shared library "as the definitive definition". That way, anyone who asks the same question gets the same answer.
It sounds obvious. In practice, very few businesses do it. Anyone who has watched two people argue about a number, only to find they were measuring different things, knows the cost.
Now imagine giving each of those people their own AI assistant, each with its own idea of what a lead is. All you'd get is faster arguments.
Small business, same mess
You might think this is only a problem for big companies with ten different systems. It isn't. A five-person business can have the same mess, just smaller. The customer list in one spreadsheet, the enquiries in someone's inbox, the bookings in an app, and nobody quite agreeing on what a "good month" means.
The instinct is to buy another tool. The better first step is cheaper and duller. Write down your five most important numbers and exactly how you measure each one. Decide where the single, true version of your customer list lives. And get everyone, and every tool, to use it.
How would it feel to ask a simple question about your business, how many new clients this quarter, say, and get one answer everyone agrees with?
Decisions get quicker, meetings get shorter, and when you do add AI it has something solid to stand on. Toby's examples were all built that way: an account health score, an agent that chases account managers when a renewal is at risk, an app inside their CRM. All of it sat on top of the plumbing.
Maybe it's time you put "What we mean by..." at the top of a sheet of paper. Then define a lead, a customer and a good month. If that takes longer than ten minutes, you've found your plumbing job.
