> Site index: [llms.txt](https://ortelian.com/llms.txt) with all pages and descriptions.

# Notes on making AI useful.

Source: https://ortelian.com/notes/
Markdown: https://ortelian.com/notes.md

The ideas behind Ortelian: how companies become AI-native, how agents understand the work and what we learn from building.

- [Is a world model for knowledge work a knowledge graph? - Partly. A knowledge graph is its structure. A world model for knowledge work adds time, sources and a line between accepted facts and guesses.](https://ortelian.com/notes/is-a-world-model-for-knowledge-work-a-knowledge-graph/)
- [What is a context graph? - A context graph connects what an agent needs for a task: the things involved, their current state and past decisions. It only holds up on a world model for knowledge work.](https://ortelian.com/notes/what-is-a-context-graph/)
- [What the EU AI Act asks of B2B companies - The Act asks little of the AI work that creates most of the value and a lot of AI that decides about people. Here are the dates, the tiers and what we would do now.](https://ortelian.com/notes/what-the-eu-ai-act-asks-of-b2b-companies/)
- [One week at one company - A week after the first call, a sales team works from a list that refreshes itself, a meeting-prep agent they check before every call and a territory model a new rep can ask for a list from.](https://ortelian.com/notes/one-week-at-one-company/)
- [The case for GraphRAG - Some questions have no single document that answers them. GraphRAG builds a connected view of the evidence once and reuses it, for broader answers than plain retrieval without rereading everything.](https://ortelian.com/notes/the-answer-is-between-the-documents/)
- [Agree the standard before you build - The deployments that last agreed quality, cost, time and human effort on real examples before anything was built. The pilots that die never agreed what good meant.](https://ortelian.com/notes/agree-the-standard-before-you-build/)
- [Redesign the work before you automate it - An agent on the current process makes the current process faster, waste included. So the first two weeks of a deployment redesign the work, and only then do we build.](https://ortelian.com/notes/redesign-the-work-before-you-automate-it/)
- [More context makes agents worse - Past a point, adding context degrades an agent. It needs the smallest sufficient view of the work, and only a model of the company can decide what that view is.](https://ortelian.com/notes/more-context-makes-agents-worse/)
- [Why coding agents work and company agents don't - Coding agents took off first because a repository is already a world an agent can stand in. A company is not, so you have to build that world before asking the agent to work.](https://ortelian.com/notes/why-coding-agents-work-and-company-agents-dont/)
- [The model can be rented. The world it works in cannot. - Every company rents the same intelligence at a falling price. The advantage that lasts is the maintained model of your own business that the intelligence works in.](https://ortelian.com/notes/the-model-can-be-rented/)
- [What sight means - Connected facts show what no single source contains. That is the real payoff of a world model, and the larger bet we are making.](https://ortelian.com/notes/what-sight-means/)
- [What is a world model for knowledge work? - A world model for knowledge work is a live, linked model of what exists in a business and the world around it, with provenance on every fact, that agents work from instead of raw text.](https://ortelian.com/notes/what-is-a-world-model-for-knowledge-work/)
- [What is an ontology? - An ontology says what exists in a business, what each thing means, how things relate and what can be done with them. The graph then holds the particular companies and people.](https://ortelian.com/notes/what-is-an-ontology/)
- [Access is not a map - Connecting an agent to the CRM, Slack and email gives it territory. The map, what those things are and how they relate, still has to be built.](https://ortelian.com/notes/access-is-not-a-map/)

## Follow the work.

Notes from Ortelian, by email.

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