Branching follow-ups
Aria's questions adapt in real time. When she detects ambiguity she probes deeper — like a partner, not a survey.
ProductAria
Aria
The Interview Agent. She captures what your tools can't see.
Aria runs autonomous conversations with every relevant stakeholder in parallel, then delivers structured intelligence Cortex can reason over. Eighty percent of operational knowledge is tacit. Aria captures it.
The problem
Eighty percent of how your company actually runs is never written down.
Forty-two percent of what an employee knows cannot be covered by colleagues. Fortune 500 companies lose $31.5B annually to poor knowledge sharing. When a thirty-year veteran retires, everything they know walks out the door.
No tool, no dashboard, no ERP captures how work actually happens. Only the people know. Aria talks to them.
80%
of operational knowledge is tacit and never documented
$31.5B
lost annually by Fortune 500 to poor knowledge sharing
100/day
stakeholders Aria can interview in parallel
Operator first. Tool second.
Designed to be configured, run, and reviewed by operating partners without a consultant in the room.
How Aria operates
Scope. Interview. Synthesize.
Aria/Operations Assessment/ProtocolDesigning
Stakeholders to interview
VP Field OperationsSenior · 5+ yr
Lead DispatcherMid · 3-5 yr
Procurement LeadSenior · 5+ yr
Customer Ops LeadMid · 3-5 yr
+ 8 more
Question structure
▸Workflow handoff probes
▸Decision-rights mapping
▸Knowledge transfer gaps
▸Tool friction points
12 stakeholders · 47 questions · ~9 min protocol
Aria · branching logic
When stakeholder…
mentions handoff delay
→ probe specific times
sentiment > 0.7
→ ask follow-up
contradicts prior
→ surface gently
drawn from 47 frameworks
Step I · Scope
You tell Aria the question leadership can't answer.
“Why does customer onboarding take six weeks?” “Where is engineering spending the most time on low-value work?” “What actually happens when a refund request comes in?”
Aria designs the interview protocol: who to talk to by role, department, tenure, and team. What questions to ask, with branching follow-ups. How deep to go. The protocol draws from forty-plus consulting frameworks — McKinsey 7S, SCOR, MECE issue trees, value stream mapping — encoded in Aria’s consulting intelligence layer. A human consultant takes two weeks to design this. Aria does it in minutes.
Frameworks encoded
40+
Protocol design time
Minutes, not weeks
Industry tuning
Adapts to your domain
Aria/Live Interview/Sarah ChenLive · 14:32
Aria
“Walk me through what happens when a deal closes. What’s the actual handoff?”
SC
“Sales drops it in a Slack thread. Then someone on CS picks it up… eventually.”
Aria
adaptive“Help me understand ‘eventually.’ How long, on a typical week?”
● transcript live● sentiment tracked● branching active
Aria · adaptive thought
Detected
Vague time descriptor: “eventually”
Probing for
Specific cycle-time, week-typical
FrameworkValue-stream mapping
Step II · Interview
Forty-five-minute autonomous conversations with every relevant stakeholder, in parallel.
Not a survey. Not a form. A real conversation that adapts in real time — asks follow-ups based on what was said, probes deeper when it detects ambiguity, and surfaces what nobody thought to ask about. Employees speak candidly because there’s no political filter, no hierarchy, no judgment. Aria interviews in the employee’s preferred language.
A consulting firm interviews ten people in a week. Aria interviews one hundred in a day.
Branching logic
Follow-up paths adapt
Sentiment detection
Flags emotional intensity
Contradiction maps
Cross-references answers
Confidentiality
Anonymized, by design
Aria/Findings/#0035 / 5 conf
“The org chart says crews report to Ops. The reality is they coordinate directly with Field supervisors.”
Citations · 14 of 23 stakeholders
VP Field Operations
“The org chart isn't how we actually coordinate.”
Lead Dispatcher
“We work with Field directly, not through Ops.”
Crew Lead, North
“Ops finds out after the fact. Always.”
+ 11 more
tagged · org-design · escalation→ Cortex
Aria · confidence trace
Score breakdown
Stakeholders agreeing14 / 23
Departments3 of 3
Tool corroborationSlack · Jira
Route toCortex →
Step III · Synthesize
Aria doesn't hand you two hundred transcripts. She delivers structured intelligence.
Themed findings with impact ratings. Specific workflow friction points with frequency counts — “fourteen of twenty-three account managers cited the same handoff delay.” Contradiction maps showing where different departments have fundamentally different understandings of the same process. Anonymized quotes that illustrate each finding. Confidence scores on every finding, based on corroboration across interviews.
All findings flow into Cortex, the Company Brain, alongside what Max observed in your tools.
Output format
Queryable knowledge graph
Every finding
Sourced & confidence-scored
Feeds into
Cortex (Company Brain)
Aria, in conversation
Listen to Aria run an interview.
A live take from a session with Sarah Chen, a field dispatch supervisor. American English, here. Forty-plus languages everywhere else, with accent-aware comprehension built in.
Consulting without any limits.
- Designed protocolMcKinsey 7S · MECE
- Ran 47 interviews in parallel3 departments · 4 tenures
- Read 184 corroborating signals
- Synthesizing findings
The Aria difference
Unlike rigid survey tools, Aria is designed not just to follow scripts, but to think and reason. She is guided by context, logic, and the institutional knowledge already living inside the company.
Texture
Forty-seven interviews in eight business days. Findings shipped before the binder.
Inputs corroborated
Template
What Aria produces
The Operational Knowledge Graph.
Not a document. A structured, queryable dataset of how work actually happens, according to the people who do it. Every finding is tagged with source count, confidence score, impact rating, and the operational wedge it belongs to.
Cortex reasons over it. Max corroborates it. The graph compounds with every conversation.
Secondary outputs
Executive Interview Summary
One-page brief: top five findings, each with a headline, a data point, and a recommended action. Built for the Monday operating committee.
Process Narratives
Plain-language descriptions of how specific workflows actually operate, side-by-side with how the SOP says they should. The gap is where the work is.
Knowledge Risk Map
Identifies which employees hold critical knowledge that isn't documented anywhere, ranked by retirement timeline. The succession crisis you didn't see coming.
We'd been chasing the same answer for two quarters. Aria gave it to us in three weeks — with the receipts to back it up.
VP, Operations
Fortune 500 enterprise
Aria vs. the alternatives
Aria is not a consulting firm, not a productivity tool, not a chatbot.
Operating partners already pay for three things to capture how their portfolio companies actually run: a consulting firm, a productivity SaaS stack, and increasingly, a generic AI tool. Each does part of the job. Aria does the part none of them does — and feeds the rest into Cortex.
vs
Management consulting
Their offering
Six humans on the ground for twelve weeks. The output is a two-hundred-page binder. Then they leave on month three. Interviews scale at consultant velocity — ten people in a week.
What Aria does
Aria runs one hundred parallel interviews in a day. The output is a queryable knowledge graph that compounds with every conversation. She doesn't leave; she stays and remembers.
vs
Enterprise SaaS · Notion AI · Glean
Their offering
Indexes the documents and tickets you already wrote. If a workflow lives only in someone's head — which is eighty percent of how your company actually runs — it doesn't exist to the index.
What Aria does
Aria captures the eighty percent of operational knowledge that is tacit and never written down. She talks to the people, not their documents. Then Cortex makes it queryable.
vs
Generic AI tools · ChatGPT · Claude
Their offering
Smart, but you have to know the right questions to ask. No memory between conversations. No industry tuning. No corroboration with your operating data.
What Aria does
Aria designs the protocol from forty-plus consulting frameworks. Her interviews are informed by what Max sees in your tools — three-tier citation discipline (interview · tool data · benchmark) by default.
They work together
Meet the other two.
Aria, on her own
Run a three-week sprint with just Aria.
Fixed-fee, sole-sourceable, and built to land inside an existing SOW envelope. Sprints are the on-ramp into the full Operations Assessment, not the destination. Pick the audience that matches the office writing the procurement order.
Start with Aria.
Pick the portco where leadership knows there's a problem but can't explain it. Aria runs the interview round in week one. You see the findings before you see an invoice.