What happened overnight?
This is an illustrative scenario, not a customer account. The people and the company are invented; every event in it maps to a real mechanism on ftes.ai, named as it happens.
The company is a software business with a product lead who used to spend Friday afternoons checking competitors' sites. The Research Analyst FTE watches a named list of public sources for a named list of competitors, approved by the product lead: pricing pages, release notes, job postings, and public filings where they exist. Overnight a detection fired: one competitor's public pricing page changed. The FTE drafted a competitive brief on the change, within its remit: what changed, with the before and after captured and dated; what the competitor's own public materials say about why; how it compares with the company's current pricing as stated in the Brand Brain; and what the FTE could not determine from public sources.
It did not contact anyone, sign up for anything, or infer the competitor's strategy beyond what the sources support.
What does the product lead see?
The morning brief, first person: the detection, the brief waiting, a proposed Brand Brain update to the competitor's pricing facts, and spend. The lead opens the brief. Every claim carries its source: the competitor's page with the capture date, their release note, a public interview. One section is labelled inference and reads as such: the change may relate to a product tier announced last month, with the reasoning shown. One section lists what could not be found: whether existing customers are affected, and a market-size figure the lead had asked about last week.
The lead notices the figure is missing and opens the note about it.
Why was a figure refused?
The FTE's note says it found a market-size figure only in an unattributed blog post and in two pages that cite that post, with no primary source. Under the fact gate a figure with no corroborated source does not go in a brief, and the FTE says so rather than including it with a caveat, because a caveated number in a brief becomes an uncaveated number in a slide. The lead agrees, and asks the FTE to add a mission to find primary sources for the figure if any exist, with a small budget. The content standard behind this library refuses invented or uncorroborated statistics for the same reason.
The brief is more useful for the gap than it would have been for the number.
- Found: one unattributed post and two pages citing it
- Refused: no primary source, no caveated inclusion
- Next: a small mission to look for a primary source
How does the memory update go?
The proposed Brand Brain update replaces the competitor's old pricing facts with the new ones, with the capture date and the source page as provenance. The lead approves it. From now on every other role that references this competitor, the SDR FTE's qualification, the Search Visibility FTE's comparison pages, reads the current facts with their provenance, because the Brand Brain is organization-wide. The old facts remain in the memory's history with their dates, which matters if someone asks later what the company knew and when.
The memory management piece in the library describes the quarterly confirmation that keeps competitor facts from going stale between detections.
What does the product lead do with the afternoon?
The judgement. Reads the brief with the head of sales and decides whether the company's pricing needs a response, which is a decision the FTE did not make and would not. Asks the FTE for a second brief on the competitor's release cadence over the past year, from release notes, as a diagnostic mission with ranked hypotheses. Reviews the watched-source list in Setup and adds a competitor the sales team mentioned, with a reason recorded. Then does the product work the Friday afternoons used to displace.
The Friday check is now a detection. The Friday thinking is still the lead's.
What does the record show at the end of the day?
The audit trail: the detection with its source and capture, the brief with every claim's source, the refused figure with the FTE's note and the lead's agreement, the memory update with provenance, the new mission with its budget, and the watched-source change. The Library tab: the brief filed with the competitor's other briefs. At the monthly review the lead will read the role's usage against what competitive research cost before, and the comparison of a Research Analyst FTE with a research firm in the library is honest that the firm still brings interviews and proprietary data the FTE cannot.
The library's piece on how a Research Analyst FTE works describes each mechanism outside the story; the competitive intelligence piece describes the watched-source design.