When someone joins an existing team, there’s usually a mountain of context that already exists somewhere. Product briefs in Google Drive. Architecture decisions in Confluence. Strategy decks from last quarter. Roadmap documents. Meeting notes. Slack threads that settled important debates. The problem isn’t that the knowledge doesn’t exist — it’s that nobody has time to walk the new person through all of it, and reading everything unguided takes weeks.
This playbook is about using AI to do focused research for a specific, time-bound purpose. You have a meeting on Thursday, an interview on Monday, a proposal due next week. You need to understand something well enough to be effective, and you don’t have four hours to read everything yourself.
The word that matters here is targeted. This isn’t general learning or ongoing curation. You have a concrete goal, specific sources to work from, and a clear picture of what you need to walk away knowing. The AI processes the raw material and produces a synthesis you can act on.