Never Repeat Your Preferences
Tell your employee once that you want short, bullet-point emails instead of long paragraphs, and every future email follows that format, weeks or months later, without you saying it again.
Keep Notes Between Tasks
Every employee keeps a personal notebook of what it has learned about you: your preferences, corrections, contacts, and how you like work done. That notebook loads automatically at the start of every conversation, so you never have to repeat yourself. Update a preference once and it sticks for good, across every future task and every channel.
Most chat tools forget everything the moment a conversation ends. Ask a fresh question tomorrow and you are re-explaining who you are, how you like emails formatted, and which CRM you use, all over again. An AI employee on Sistava keeps a running notebook instead: a single file where it writes down what it learns about you as you work together, and reads back before every reply.
The notebook holds five kinds of things: your profile and business context, feedback and preferences you have given (both corrections and confirmations), facts like contacts and account IDs, recurring processes and rules, and shorthand like nicknames or project codenames. When you correct your employee or confirm something worked well, it writes that down before it even finishes replying to you, so the lesson is not lost to the next session.
The difference from a generic chatbot's "memory" feature is what gets kept and how. A chat log grows forever and buries the useful line under a thousand unrelated ones; this notebook is edited in place, topic by topic, so an old preference gets updated or merged rather than piling up next to a dozen near-duplicates. It stays a short, current reference an employee can actually scan every turn, not an archive it has to search through.
This is separate from the Work Journal, which is a dated, append-only log of what happened on each task. The notebook is the opposite: not what happened, but what to remember going forward. Together they mean an employee that has worked with you for months treats you like someone who has worked with you for months, not like someone meeting you for the first time on every visit.
What Gets Remembered
Five categories make up the notebook: your profile and business context (role, goals, communication style), feedback and preferences with the reasoning behind them, facts and references like contacts and tool setups, recurring patterns and business rules, and shorthand for names and project terms your team uses casually.
What does not get saved: one-off tasks (those belong in the Work Journal), temporary states like "traveling this week," small talk, and one-time lookups with no lasting preference behind them. The goal is a notebook that stays short and useful, not a transcript of everything that was ever said.
Staying Current, Not Just Growing
A notebook that only ever adds lines becomes as useless as no notebook at all: eventually the real preferences are buried under stale or duplicate ones. Employees are built to edit the notebook in place, merge duplicate notes, drop entries that went stale (a contact left, a process changed), and reorganize sections once they get long.
Because the notebook is a real file, you can open it yourself from the employee's file view at any time to see exactly what your employee currently believes about you and your business, and correct anything that is wrong.
How It Works
One notebook file, loaded before every reply
Every employee is hired with this built in; there is nothing to turn on. The notebook lives as a file in the employee's own storage and is loaded into context automatically at the start of every conversation, whether you are chatting, the employee is running an autonomous task, or a teammate is talking to the same employee from a different channel.
Writing to it follows a simple priority: when you correct your employee or state a preference, it updates the notebook first, then its work journal, then replies to you. That order matters because it is what keeps the correction from getting lost if the conversation moves on quickly.
The notebook also carries across people in your workspace, not just you. If a teammate tells your employee something durable, it gets recorded with who said it and their role, so a private aside does not silently become a company-wide rule. Sensitive details like credentials are never written to it.
Use Cases
Onboard An Employee Once
Explain your business, your main competitor, and how your team is structured during your first real conversation. That context stays loaded on every future task, so a specialist you hire later is already working with an accurate picture of your business.
Keep Facts And Contacts On Hand
Mention your CRM's pipeline stages or a key contact's role once, and your employee can reference them correctly in later tasks, like drafting an update that references the right stage names or CCs the right person.
Correct Course And Have It Stick
If an employee gets your tone or process wrong, correct it in the moment. The correction is written to the notebook before the reply finishes, so the same mistake does not resurface in a different conversation next week.
FAQ
Do I have to set anything up for an employee to keep notes?
No. Every employee keeps a notebook from the moment you hire them; it is a built-in part of how they work, not an optional setting.
Is the notebook shared across all my employees, or does each one have its own?
Each employee keeps its own notebook, built from the conversations and work it personally does with you and your team.
Can I see or edit what my employee has written down about me?
Yes. The notebook is a real file you can open from the employee's file view, so you can review it and correct anything that is inaccurate or outdated.
What's the difference between the notebook and the Work Journal?
The Work Journal is a dated, append-only record of what your employee did on each task. The notebook is the opposite: not what happened, but the lasting preferences and facts your employee should apply going forward.
Will my employee remember something I only mentioned once, in passing?
If it is a durable preference or fact, yes, employees are built to save the moment they learn something worth keeping rather than waiting until the conversation ends. One-off details with no lasting value, like a passing comment about being busy this week, are left out on purpose.
Where Keep Notes Between Tasks fits
Keep Notes Between Tasks is part of Things that make them smart.
Upload documents, connect Notion or Google Docs, and choose the source content that becomes shared company knowledge. A 6-layer memory system ensures they never forget a conversation, a decision, or a preference. When one employee learns something new, the whole team benefits through shared knowledge.
- Things that make them smart: Learns everything. Forgets nothing.
Read the guide
More in Knowledge
- Remember Every Conversation: Your AI employees remember what happened in past conversations, across your whole workspace, not just the one they are in right now. Preferences, decisions, and facts shared in chat get carried forward automatically, so you never have to repeat yourself to the same employee, or explain the backstory to a different one. It works out of the box, with nothing to set up or turn on.
- Custom Knowledge Training: Feed your company's existing knowledge into your AI employees so they answer questions and make decisions using your real data, not generic guesses. Train from a connected app (Notion, Slack, HubSpot, and 65+ more), a website crawl, an uploaded file, or pasted text. Training is company-wide: every employee shares the same knowledge base and searches it automatically on every conversation.
- Train from File Uploads: Upload a PDF, Word doc, Excel sheet, PowerPoint deck, plain text, Markdown, CSV, JSON, or XML file straight into Training, and every employee on your team can search it within minutes. Up to 20 files per run, each up to 72 MB, feed the same shared knowledge base your employees check on every message. No connected app and no crawlable URL required.
- Academy Courses: Sistava Academy is a set of free, self-paced courses that teach you how to get real work out of an AI employee. Each course is a short series of written lessons you read in the browser, no video required, followed by a quiz. Pass the quiz and you get a certificate of completion with your name on it, ready to download as a PDF.
- Shared Team Knowledge: What one AI employee learns in conversation, every employee in your workspace can draw on, automatically. Tell your sales lead about a new pricing rule and your support employee already has it the next time a customer asks, with no retraining and no copy-pasting the same context into each employee. Train an employee on a set of documents (a policy, a playbook, a product spec) and that knowledge is searched before every response across the workspace, so new hires start from what the team already knows instead of a blank slate.
- Train From Any Source: Train your AI employees on the documents and tools your company already uses: upload files, point at any URL, or connect an app like Notion, Google Drive, Slack, or Zendesk. Training happens in place, with no exporting and re-uploading, and it teaches the whole workspace at once, not just one employee.