# How to Give AI Your Company Rules and Processes

*How-to — 2026-09-22 — by Mahmoud Zalt*

Turn your SOPs, approval limits, and escalation rules into instructions an AI Employee follows every time, written in plain English.

**Short answer.** **You give AI your company rules by splitting them into three kinds: standing rules that always hold, step-by-step processes for specific jobs, and approval gates that stop the work and ask you.** Each kind goes in a different place, and each is written the way you would explain it to a new hire. The hard part is not the writing. It is that half your rules have never been written down at all.

Every business runs on rules that live in one person's head. Never quote that client without a site visit. Always call before sending an invoice over a certain size. If they mention their lawyer, stop and come to me.

Those rules are why the business has not blown up yet. They are also why you cannot hand work off, because nobody else knows them, and you only notice a rule exists at the moment somebody breaks it. AI hits exactly the same wall for exactly the same reason.

In **Sistava**, your rules land in three separate places on purpose. Standing rules go into duties, which apply to every task without exception. Processes go into skills, which are how-to instructions the AI Employee pulls up when a matching job appears. Approval gates sit on tool access, so the work pauses and waits for a human before anything leaves the building. All three are written in plain English.

## At a Glance

- **3** Kinds of rule, each with its own home
- **Every task** How often a standing rule is checked
- **On match** When a process gets pulled up and followed
- **Before sending** Where an approval gate stops the work

## What is the difference between a rule, a process, and an approval?

A rule is always true, a process is what to do in one situation, and an approval is a hard stop. "Never promise a delivery date we have not confirmed with the depot" is a rule. "How to handle a damaged-goods complaint" is a process. "Nothing involving a refund goes out without me" is an approval. Put each one in the wrong place and it either gets ignored or slows everything down.

The reason the split exists is cost and attention. Standing rules are short because they are checked on every single task. Processes can be long and detailed because they only get loaded when they are relevant. Approvals are not text at all, they are a switch on what the AI Employee is allowed to do without you.

## Benefits

### Standing rules

Short, absolute, always checked. Things like never quoting below your floor rate or never naming another client. Keep this list under ten.

### Processes

Your step-by-step way of handling one job. Can be long and specific, because it only gets pulled up when that job appears.

### Approval gates

The point where work stops and waits for a person. Money, legal wording, promises, and anything a customer sees first.

### Escalation paths

Who to hand a task to, and on what trigger. Written as a plain sentence: if the customer mentions cancelling, bring it to me.

### Exceptions

The named accounts and edge cases where the normal rule does not apply. These are the rules people forget to write down.

### Corrections

A rule you discover in the moment. Say it out loud once and it holds from then on, without a rewrite of the whole document.

## How do you write down a process you have never documented?

Do not start from a blank page. Take the last five real examples of that job, put them side by side, and write down what you did in all five. That is your process. It takes about twenty minutes and it is far more accurate than anything you would invent in the abstract.

Then write the branches. Most processes are simple until something goes wrong, and the whole value of writing it down is the bit that handles the exception. What if the client has an outstanding invoice. What if they ask for a discount. What if it is the third complaint from the same account this quarter.

Finish with the stop points. Every process should say clearly where it ends and a human takes over. A process with no stop point is how automation embarrasses you in front of a customer, and a process with too many stop points is just you doing the work with extra steps.

## Where should approval gates go?

Put a gate anywhere a mistake would cost money, a customer, or a legal argument. In practice that is a short list: quotes and discounts, refunds and credits, contract or policy wording, anything promising a date, and the first message to a new client. Everything else can run without you.

Start tighter than feels comfortable and open up as trust builds. Approving twenty drafts in week one is a fair price for finding out where the judgement is weak. By week three you will know which gates were protecting you and which were just anxiety, and you can drop the second kind.

- Money: any quote, discount, refund, credit, or invoice adjustment.
- Promises: delivery dates, turnaround times, availability, and anything phrased as a guarantee.
- Legal and policy: contract wording, terms, complaints that name a regulator or a lawyer.
- First contact: the first message to a brand new client, where there is no history to lean on.
- Named accounts: the two or three relationships where you want eyes on everything, regardless of the rule.

## What does this look like for a real business?

Hassan runs a commercial cleaning company in Toronto with twelve staff, mostly office buildings and two small hospitals. About thirty quote requests come in a week, and every single one waited for him, because the pricing logic and the rules about which jobs to refuse were entirely in his head.

He wrote seven standing rules. Never quote below the floor rate per square metre. Never take on a site without a scheduled walkthrough. Never accept payment terms longer than thirty days. Never quote medical sites without flagging them to him. Never name another client in a proposal. Always state the crew size. Always include the cancellation clause.

Then he wrote one process, for quoting, built from his last five quotes. It covered how to read a request, what to ask when the square footage is missing, how to handle a request for nightly rather than weekly service, and what to do when the prospect leads with price. The whole thing was two pages and took him an afternoon.

The gates were narrow. The AI Employee could read the enquiry inbox, ask clarifying questions, and prepare a full quote, but nothing with a number in it left without Hassan pressing approve. Six weeks in, roughly 26 of the 30 weekly requests reached him as a finished quote he approved in under two minutes. The four that did not were the ones his rules correctly refused to price.

| Hassan's rule | Kind of rule | What happens when it fires |
|---|---|---|
| Never quote below the floor rate | Standing rule | The quote is never written, he gets told why |
| Always schedule a walkthrough first | Standing rule | The reply asks for a site visit date |
| How to handle a missing square footage | Process step | It asks the prospect, then continues |
| Medical sites | Escalation | Handed straight to Hassan, unpriced |
| Any number in a customer-facing document | Approval gate | Draft waits, nothing sends |

**Write the exceptions, not just the rule.** Most business rules have two or three named exceptions that everybody in the office knows and nobody has typed. Those exceptions are where automation goes wrong. Write them next to the rule, in the same sentence, and the problem disappears.

## What can rules and processes never fix?

They cannot make a judgement call that has no precedent. If a situation is genuinely new, no rule covers it, and the correct behaviour is to stop and ask rather than to improvise. That is exactly what an escalation path is for, and it is a feature rather than a shortfall.

They also cannot survive contradiction. If two of your rules conflict, you will get inconsistent results, and the fix is on your side rather than the AI's. The most common version of this is a hard rule in the brief that a process quietly contradicts three steps in.

- It will not enforce a rule you never wrote down, no matter how obvious the rule feels to you.
- It cannot resolve two rules that contradict each other, so it may follow either one.
- It will not know a rule changed last Tuesday unless somebody updated it.
- It cannot tell whether a rule should be bent for a valued client, which is why named exceptions matter.
- It will not fix a process that is broken. It will follow your broken process faster and more consistently.

### How to hand over your rules in one afternoon

1. **List the ten things that must never happen** — Write them as short absolute sentences. If a rule needs a paragraph of context, it is a process, not a standing rule.
2. **Pick one job and document it from five real examples** — Take your last five, write what you did in all of them, then add the branches for when it goes wrong.
3. **Mark every stop point** — Say exactly where the work pauses for a person: money, promises, legal wording, first contact with a new client.
4. **Write the escalation triggers as sentences** — If the customer mentions cancelling, bring it to me. If it is a medical site, do not price it. Plain language works.
5. **Run it for two weeks and add what you missed** — Every time you catch something in review, that is an unwritten rule surfacing. Say it once and it holds from then on.

## Comparison

| Dimension | Traditional | With Sista |
|---|---|---|
| Who can follow them | Only you, and only when you are available. | Anyone, human or AI Employee, at any hour. |
| Consistency | Depends on how your week is going. | Applied the same way on task one and task five hundred. |
| Exceptions | Remembered most of the time. | Named next to the rule, so they fire every time. |
| Handover | Months of shadowing, and gaps for years. | An afternoon of writing, then corrections. |
| When you are away | Work stops or somebody guesses. | Work continues, and the risky parts wait for you. |

## Frequently asked questions

## FAQ

### How do I turn my SOPs into something AI can follow?

Split them by how often they apply. Absolute rules that hold on every task become standing rules and stay short. Job-specific procedures become skills, which can be as detailed as you like because they only load when that job appears. Anything risky gets an approval gate on top.

### What if my processes have never been written down?

Build them from your last five real examples rather than from memory. Write what you actually did in all five, then add the branches for the situations that went sideways. Twenty minutes of that beats an hour of trying to describe your process in the abstract.

### How do I stop AI from doing something risky on its own?

Put an approval gate on the action, not on the topic. Gates belong on money, promises with dates in them, legal or policy wording, first contact with a new client, and any account you have flagged. The work still gets prepared, it just waits for you before it leaves.

### How many standing rules is too many?

Past roughly ten, they start to blur and contradict each other. If your list is growing, that is a sign some of those entries are really processes and belong with the job they describe. Short absolute rules stay sharp, long conditional ones do not.

### Can I set different rules for different roles?

Yes, and you should. Your sales role and your support role need different limits, different escalation paths, and different tool access. Shared business facts stay shared, but the rules and permissions are set per role so nothing gets a wider reach than its job needs.

### What happens when a rule changes?

You update it once and it applies from the next task onward. There is no retraining step and no waiting period. The genuine risk is forgetting to update it, which is the same risk you already carry with a team of humans following an old version.

The useful side effect of all this is that you end up with a written operating manual for your business. Most owners have never had one, and it turns out to be worth more than the automation it was written for.

If your gap is facts rather than rules, the companion piece on training AI on your own company documents covers that layer. If it is tone, start with the brand voice one instead.

**Tags:** company-rules, sops, approval-workflow, ai-employees, business-processes