You've been using AI for a year now. Maybe two. Not everybody's in the same spot with it. Maybe you've got one AI account and a handful of chats. Maybe you've got Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini all running, with a dozen projects split across the three. Either way, you've got the same problem. You didn't stop at one chat. You built projects: one for marketing, one for a client, one for that idea you're still chasing. Inside each project, the chats talk to each other. Ask a follow-up next week and it remembers, because it's still inside that project. But the projects don't know about each other. Your marketing project has no idea what your ops project already figured out. And if you're spread across more than one AI platform, it's worse. Your Claude projects have never met your ChatGPT projects. You've built a dozen smart rooms with no doors between them. And some of those rooms aren't even in the same house. And somewhere along the way you had this thought: how do I connect all of this? All these projects, all these platforms, all these good ideas, each one stuck in its own room. That's the right question. The answer is a brain. And here's the part most people don't know. You're not locked into one AI platform to build it. Point Claude at it. Point ChatGPT at it. Point Gemini at it. All three if you want, reading and writing the same files. The brain doesn't care which AI you open that day. It's yours, not theirs.  

What an Obsidian Brain Actually Is

An Obsidian brain is a single place where everything you know lives, and every piece of it is connected to every other piece. Obsidian is a free app. On its own it's just a note-taking tool that stores plain text files on your own computer. Nothing fancy. What makes it a brain is what you put in it and how you wire it together. You feed it your world. Meeting transcripts. Articles you saved. Your own raw notes. Contracts. Podcasts you listened to. The exports of those AI chats you thought you'd lost. Then you point an AI at it. The AI reads all of it, writes summary pages, builds pages for every person and company and idea, and links them together. Every note connects to the notes it relates to. The result is a living map of everything you know that gets smarter every time you add to it. That's the part nobody tells you. A chatbot forgets. A brain remembers, and it connects.  

Where This Method Actually Comes From

I didn't invent this pattern. Andrej Karpathy did. He co-founded OpenAI. He's one of the most respected AI researchers alive. Earlier this year he published the exact method for this: how to get an AI agent to build and maintain a wiki like this automatically, instead of a human doing all the linking and organizing by hand. In his words: “The wiki is a persistent, compounding artifact.” A few weeks after he published it, he joined Anthropic, the company that builds Claude, to work on the core of how Claude gets trained. The person who wrote the blueprint for this is now inside the company building the AI that runs it. That's not a fringe internet trick. That's about as close to the source as it gets.  

Why This Matters in an Agency

Think about what's scattered across your agency right now.

• Carrier conversations living in one person's inbox
• The reason you set up a workflow three years ago, gone with the employee who left
• A great marketing idea from a podcast that never went anywhere
• Client patterns nobody has time to notice
• The same question answered five different ways by five different people

None of it talks to each other. It's all trapped in heads and inboxes and folders. A brain pulls it into one place and starts surfacing the connections. Here's what that looks like day to day:

• Ask “what did we decide about this carrier and why” and get a real answer, sourced from your own history
• Onboard a new hire against a brain that already holds how your agency actually works
• Catch a pattern across your book you'd never see one policy at a time
• Turn a year of scattered thinking into one page you can act on

That last one is the whole point. The synthesis is where the money is.  

The Part Almost Nobody Is Doing

Here's my honest read of the market. Fewer than one in a hundred agents are building a personal brain like this. And the number building one inside their agency, wired into how the business actually runs, is close to zero. That's not a knock on anyone. This is new, and most people are still stuck in the one-question-at-a-time chatbot world. They don't know the next level exists. But it does. And it's where AI is going. The chatbot was the demo. The brain is the product.  

Where It Goes Next

Once your agency has a brain, you can put workers on top of it. Not a single chatbot answering questions. Actual AI co-workers, each one linked to your agency brain, each one built for a job. One for service. One for sales. One for marketing. One for finance. One for operations. They pull from the same connected source, so they're not guessing. They know your agency because your agency is the brain they're reading from. And your team uses them in real time, right in the flow of work. That's not a someday thing. I'm building it right now.

Come Watch Me Build One

I'm doing a one-hour show and tell on July 17 at 10am Central. I'm going to open up my own personal brain and my Insurance Alliance agency brain and show you exactly how I built them. No theory. The actual thing, live. If you want in, it runs inside my mastermind. You can sign up here: agencyintelligencemastermind.com Fewer than one percent of agents are doing this. Be one of them.