Approved Expertise: What Your Wingman Knows and Colleagues Can Ask

Approved expertise is how a person actually does their work, learned by their own Wingman as they work and approved by them. Any colleague's Wingman can ask for it, and every answer is stamped from that person's Wingman with a confidence grade.

It is the unit the Company Brain is made of. Not pages, not transcripts, not embeddings of old Slack threads: the working knowledge itself, kept with the person who owns it.

What's inside one

Take the discount rules Alex's Wingman holds. Behind that one line sits everything a colleague's Wingman needs to get Alex's answer without Alex:

• The definition. Which codes apply to which plans, and since when. Not "discounts" in the abstract; discounts as this company runs them.
• The data. Which tables, which filters, which exclusions.
• The thresholds and exceptions. What counts, what does not, and the edge cases Alex learned the hard way.
• The judgment calls. When to distrust the number, what to check next.
• The output. What a finished answer looks like, so the quality is reproducible.

It lives with the person's Wingman

Expertise is not uploaded to a library. Your Wingman learns it from you, keeps what you approve, and answers for you when a colleague's Wingman asks. The Company's Agent Directory is the map that makes the asking possible: every capability points to the Wingman that owns it, so "who owns annual plans?" resolves in one step.

Product → Billing & Discounts → Alex's Wingman

You stay the owner. Update how you work, and every answer built on it updates with you.

The lifecycle: work, approve, ask, improve

• Work. Expertise is born inside real work. A person and their Wingman get something done that works. Nobody sits down to write it up.
• Approve. The Wingman asks one question about what it learned; the person decides what it keeps. Nothing enters without them.
• Ask. From that moment any colleague's Wingman can ask, in plain English, and get an answer in seconds with the owner's name on it. The owner is not interrupted.
• Improve. Constant use surfaces drift fast, and every solve that builds on a piece of expertise sharpens it.

Confidence you can see

Every company answer ends with a grade and one plain sentence naming whose expertise carried it:

• High confidenceThe answer follows a colleague's approved expertise as written. "This is the discount rules, from Alex's Wingman."
• Moderate confidenceThe expertise left one real judgment open, a definition, a cut-off, a join, and the Wingman made it. The sentence names that one thing.
• Low confidenceNothing proven covered the question. The answer was worked out from the data itself.

Ordinary analytics on proven ground, totals, filters, breakdowns, comparisons, is still High. The grade is about whose judgment the answer stands on, not how much arithmetic was added on top.

What approved expertise looks like in practice

One morning's work drew on the first and produced the fourth. That compounding is the whole point. See it happen in How Catalyst works.

Frequently asked questions

What is approved expertise in one sentence?

How a person actually does their work, learned by their own Wingman and approved by them, so any colleague's Wingman can ask for it and every answer carries their name.

How does something become approved?

By working. Your Wingman learns as you get things done and asks what to keep. Colleagues' Wingmen can ask from that moment.

Is this the same as a prompt library?

No. A prompt is a way of asking. Approved expertise is the how of the work itself: data, definitions, thresholds, judgment, output, with an owner and an approval behind it.

Who gets the credit?

The owner, every time, by name. Your Overview shows how many times colleagues leaned on your expertise and how much meeting time it saved them.

What about stale expertise?

Constant use surfaces drift quickly. The owner's Wingman learns the new way as they work, and every answer built on it updates at once.