M
MERIDIAN / American Hat Makers
Confidential

Intelligence Platform Proposal — May 14, 2026

From tribal knowledge
to collective intelligence.

A phased plan to extract what G and Ori know, make it queryable by every employee, and build the data foundation that powers your push from days to hours — without adding headcount.

Client
American Hat Makers
Presented by
Michael Bitler + Ely Beckman / MERIDIAN
Prepared for
Garth Watrous, Ori Adler, Christopher Gouldy
Follow-up call
May 14, 2026 at 2:00 PM
Deployment
Dedicated VPS — your data stays yours

What we heard today

53 years of operational knowledge, two people's heads, zero structure. These are the six pressure points you named — and each one has a direct solution path.

Tribal knowledge bottleneck
Severity: critical — blocks scaling
P0

G and Ori are the single source of truth for virtually every operational question. The team interrupts constantly. The company's pace is capped by how many questions two people can answer in a day.

Ori said it plainly: "We've almost crippled our team." The fix isn't training — it's externalizing the knowledge into a system the team can query at 3x the speed of a human answer.

500+ SOPs — unused
Severity: high — compliance + onboarding gap
P0

The SOPs exist. They're just not findable, not current, and not adopted. Ori is sitting on 6-8 years of documentation she can't audit manually against current software stacks.

Solution: ingest everything, filter against the active tool list, flag what's stale, and surface only live SOPs at the point of need — not as a PDF someone has to hunt for.

Google Drive chaos
Severity: high — knowledge is siloed and lost
P1

Critical files live in employees' "My Drive" — shared ad-hoc, never catalogued. Chris spent 13 months learning how to hunt. That institutional cost compounds across every new hire.

A living index automatically maps every document — what it is, who owns it, where it lives, when it was last updated — and feeds that map directly into the shared brain.

No supplier quality visibility
Severity: high — direct revenue + margin impact
P1

You know some suppliers produce more unsellable hats than others — but you have "almost no visibility" on the actual percentages. That blind spot is a margin problem hiding in plain sight inside Fulfill.io.

Supplier quality scoring pulls from order data and return/reject signals already in your ERP — no new data collection required.

Lead time: days → hours
Severity: medium — strategic goal + competitive edge
P1

G's goal is explicit: measure lead time in hours, not days. You already beat competitors on weeks-to-days. The next compression requires warehouse intelligence — pick routing, staff scheduling, product placement optimization — fed by real data, not intuition.

Customer intelligence gap
Severity: medium — DTC growth lever
P2

40% of revenue is DTC. Your fit quiz, review history, and order data contain a goldmine of customer signals — but they're not connected. Personalized product recommendations, review-driven product pages, and repurchase triggers are all sitting in disconnected systems.

It's not a training problem. It's a knowledge architecture problem.

Every pain point traces back to the same root: the company's intelligence lives in people's heads and disconnected systems, not in a queryable structure.

The central bottleneck: G and Ori are performing the function of a database — receiving queries, locating information, and returning answers. That function should be automated. The human bottleneck dissolves when the knowledge is structured, indexed, and accessible by any employee through a system rather than a person.
What a knowledge graph changes

A knowledge graph is a living, queryable database of everything your company knows — SOPs, Loom videos, order history, supplier performance, file locations, customer signals. It's the shared brain that doesn't forget, doesn't get interrupted, and retrieves the right answer in under a second.

The Loom videos Ori mentioned are exactly the right starting point. They're crude oil. Run through the right pipeline — transcript, structure, index, ingest — and each video becomes a node in the collective brain. Any employee can ask "how do I do X" and get G's actual process, in G's actual words, without paging G.

The brain compounds. Every interaction, every new SOP, every Fulfill.io update adds signal. In 6 months the system knows more than any individual. In 12 months it outperforms the tribal knowledge it replaced.

Three phases. One direction: G's goal.

Each phase delivers standalone value and unlocks the next. Phase 1 is the prerequisite — everything else is built on the foundation it creates.

Phase 1
Knowledge Foundation
$22,500
One-time build · Weeks 1–6
Ingest Loom library, SOP archive, and Google Drive. Build the knowledge graph. Launch the first agent: any employee can query the collective brain.
Phase 2
Ops Intelligence
$5,500/mo
Monthly retainer · Month 2 onward
GarBot + OriBot deployed. Supplier quality dashboard live. SOP nudges via Google Chat. Fulfill.io data feeding the brain continuously.
Phase 3
Revenue Intelligence
$7,500/mo
Replaces Phase 2 rate · Month 4+
Customer personalization engine. B2B lead intelligence. Inventory forecasting. Warehouse pick optimization. The full stack running together.

Knowledge Foundation

Build the brain. The single deliverable that makes everything else possible.

Week 1–2
Loom Library Ingestion
Every Loom video transcribed, structured, and indexed into the knowledge graph. Each video becomes a searchable node — linked to the process it describes, the department it belongs to, and the software it references.
  • Full transcript pipeline (video → text → structured SOP nodes)
  • Automatic tagging by department, software tool, and process category
  • Cross-reference against current active software stack — flag any Loom referencing deprecated tools
Week 2–3
SOP Archive + Google Drive Index
500+ SOPs ingested, filtered for currency, and linked to the relevant Looms. Google Drive mapped into a living index — every file, every owner, every location, auto-updated as the Drive changes.
  • SOP freshness scoring — flag anything referencing software not in the current stack
  • Duplicate SOP detection — surface conflicting procedures so G/Ori can resolve once, not repeatedly
  • Google Drive living index: file name, department, owner, last modified, purpose — searchable in one place
Week 3–4
Fulfill.io Data Connection
Connect to Fulfill.io's API (or scheduled export) to bring order data, supplier data, and inventory signals into the knowledge graph. This seeds the supplier quality module and the warehouse intelligence layer.
  • Supplier performance baseline: order volume, reject/return rates, lead times per supplier
  • Product-location map for warehouse optimization groundwork
  • Order velocity signals: daily/weekly patterns by SKU, by channel
Week 5–6
The First Agent: "Ask the Manual"
Deploy the first persistent agent — accessible via Google Chat (where your team already works). Any employee types a question; the agent returns the right answer in seconds, with a source link. The brain is live.
  • Google Chat integration — no new app to install, no behavior change required
  • Sourced answers: every response cites the Loom, SOP, or data node it came from
  • Fallback protocol: if the brain doesn't know, it routes to the right human — and logs the gap so the knowledge can be added
  • Employee onboarding walkthrough for G, Ori, Chris + designated department leads
Phase 1 deliverable: A working knowledge graph populated with your Looms, SOPs, and Drive index. One live agent in Google Chat. Any employee can query the collective brain. G and Ori spend measurably fewer hours answering repeated questions.

What we need from you to start: Loom workspace access (view/export), Google Drive read access (service account), Fulfill.io API credentials or scheduled export, and 2-hour working session with Ori to map the SOP categories and department structure.

Ops Intelligence Agents

The brain is running. Now give G and Ori their counterparts — agents that know everything they know, available to the whole team, 24/7.

GarBot — the ops brain G wishes he could clone
Live in Month 2

GarBot is trained on G's decision patterns, his language, and 53 years of operational institutional knowledge extracted from Looms, meeting transcripts, and SOPs. It can answer the questions G gets interrupted for 20 times a day — without paging G. It flags the ones it can't handle with the right context already pulled.

Available in Google Chat. Accessible to any team member with the right permission tier. Logs every interaction so G can review — and every gap it surfaces becomes a knowledge-graph enrichment task.

OriBot — ops enforcer and SOP librarian
Live in Month 2

OriBot knows every SOP, every process, and every tool the team uses. When someone is about to do something the wrong way, OriBot intercepts — via Google Chat nudge — before the mistake compounds. When someone needs "how do I do X," OriBot returns the live SOP, the relevant Loom, and the step count.

This is the IKEA model Ori described: no walls of text, no hunting. Point at the step, show the picture, done.

Supplier Quality Dashboard
Live in Month 2

Every supplier scored automatically against order data: reject rate, unsellable rate, lead time variance, volume history. Refreshed weekly from Fulfill.io. G gets the supplier ranking he currently has almost no visibility on — without any manual analysis.

The data is already in Fulfill.io. This surfaces it.

Monthly included in Phase 2 retainer

Knowledge graph maintenance (new Looms, SOP updates, Drive changes auto-indexed) · Monthly ops intelligence digest for G and Ori · Knowledge gap log review (what the agents couldn't answer — backfill sessions) · 1x monthly working call (60 min) with your team · VPS hosting + agent uptime monitoring

Revenue Intelligence

The operational brain is running. Now turn the same data layer toward your customers and your growth engine.

Customer Intelligence Engine
DTC + Amazon · Fit quiz · Reviews

Connect Shopify, Amazon, and your fit-quiz data into a unified customer graph. Every customer has a profile: hat preferences (brim width, crown, material, style), purchase history, reviews written, fit quiz responses. The engine uses that profile to surface the right product, the right recommendation, and the right re-engagement trigger.

Product pages become dynamic — surfacing reviews from customers with similar fit profiles. Email sequences become personalized — based on what a customer actually bought and what customers like them buy next. The fit quiz stops being a widget and becomes an acquisition engine.

B2B Intelligence Layer
Fair.com · Wholesale · Lead generation

B2B order patterns analyzed for ICP signals: which wholesale buyers reorder fastest, highest volume, lowest returns, longest relationships. Build the ideal customer profile for the Fair.com channel — and use it to target outreach, prioritize account management, and flag at-risk accounts before they churn.

Chris mentioned this was on the active list. The data exists in Fulfill.io + your CRM. The intelligence layer connects and surfaces it.

Warehouse + Lead Time Optimization
Pick routing · Staff scheduling · Hours not days

Order velocity data by SKU, time of day, and channel — used to recommend optimal product placement, pick-route sequencing, and staffing patterns. The same data G is currently running on intuition, made explicit and automated.

This is the path from days to hours. Not through adding headcount — through removing friction from the picking and packing workflow itself.

What it costs. What it returns.

Simple structure. No long-term lock-in. Phase 1 is fixed-fee; Phases 2 and 3 are month-to-month with 30-day cancellation.

Phase Investment Term What you get
Phase 1 — Knowledge Foundation $22,500 One-time · 6 weeks Knowledge graph built, Looms + SOPs + Drive ingested, first agent live in Google Chat
Phase 2 — Ops Intelligence $5,500/mo Month-to-month · 30-day notice GarBot + OriBot, supplier quality dashboard, SOP enforcement, monthly digest + call
Phase 3 — Revenue Intelligence $7,500/mo Month-to-month · 30-day notice Everything in Phase 2 + customer intelligence, B2B ICP engine, warehouse optimization
VPS Hosting Included Ongoing Dedicated server — your data never touches shared infrastructure. Included in monthly retainer.
6 wks
to first agent live
Day 1
employees can query the brain
30 days
cancellation notice on retainer
1 server
your data, isolated, private
How to think about ROI: If GarBot and OriBot each save 10 interruptions per day — and each interruption costs G or Ori 15 minutes — that's 2.5 hours/day of high-value executive time recovered from answering repeated questions. At that rate, the ROI conversation becomes simple. And that's before supplier quality improvement, warehouse optimization, or any customer intelligence uplift.

Server-based. Isolated. Built for your environment.

No dependency on Claude, Gemini, or GPT. The platform is model-agnostic — it works with any underlying AI, which means no vendor lock-in and no disruption if the AI market shifts.

Your dedicated VPS — one server, one tenant. Your Loom transcripts, SOP archive, order data, and customer signals never touch shared infrastructure. MERIDIAN runs the knowledge graph (Neo4j) and the agent layer on a dedicated node you can verify.

Google Workspace native — agents surface in Google Chat, the tool your team already uses. No new app. No onboarding curve. The first thing employees notice is that answers come faster, not that a new system appeared.

Fulfill.io connected — we integrate with your existing ERP via API or scheduled export. No disruption to current workflows. The intelligence layer sits on top of what you already run.

On-premise option available — if you want the server on-site rather than in the cloud, the architecture supports it. We've built for edge computing. That's a conversation for Phase 1 scoping.

Three things to close Phase 1.

Ready to move at G's speed?

The follow-up call is May 14 at 2:00 PM. Here's what closes Phase 1 and gets the clock started.

  • 1
    Agree on scope and start date — confirm Phase 1 and the 6-week timeline on tomorrow's call. We can start the week of May 19.
  • 2
    Sign the Phase 1 engagement letter — simple 2-page document. 50/50 payment: $11,250 at signing, $11,250 at agent launch. Sent within 24 hours of commitment.
  • 3
    Schedule the 2-hour kickoff session with Ori — SOP category mapping and department structure. This is the only time requirement on your team in Phase 1. Everything else we handle.
Questions before tomorrow's call? Reach Michael at michael@speedoftrust.ai or Ely at ely@speedoftrust.ai

Frequently asked questions

Is our data safe on a VPS we don't control?

The server is dedicated to American Hat Makers — no shared tenancy. You have read access to the server at any point. All data ingested (Loom transcripts, SOPs, order data) stays on that server. We don't send it to third-party AI services — the model inference happens locally or through your existing Google Workspace Gemini subscription if you prefer. On-premise is also an option if you want the hardware in your facility.

How long does it actually take to see value?

The first demo of the knowledge graph — with your Looms ingested and queryable — happens at the end of Week 2. The first agent in Google Chat goes live at the end of Week 6. Phase 2 agents (GarBot + OriBot) come online 4-6 weeks after Phase 1 completes. The supplier quality dashboard appears on the same timeline. ROI on Phase 1 is measurable by Month 2.

What happens if we want to cancel?

Phase 1 is fixed-fee — once the agent is live and the knowledge graph is built, that work is yours. The monthly retainer (Phases 2 and 3) is month-to-month with 30-day written notice. We don't believe in long-term contracts that outlast the value delivered. If it's working, you'll stay. If it's not, you should leave.

How much time does your team need to put in?

Phase 1: one 2-hour kickoff session with Ori, plus credential sharing for Loom, Google Drive, and Fulfill.io. That's it. No weekly check-ins, no homework. We build; you review the demo at Week 2 and sign off on the agent at Week 6. Monthly retainer: one 60-minute call per month. Everything else is async.

Does this conflict with our Gemini evaluation?

No — and in fact, it complements it. MERIDIAN's platform is model-agnostic. If Gemini is your preferred AI layer through Google Workspace, we can route agent inference through your Gemini subscription. The knowledge graph and the agent architecture are independent of the underlying model. You can run Gemini today and swap to a different model in 12 months without rebuilding anything.