Company OS: start here

Current capability: Company OS gives people and agents governed company context, permissions, work coordination, approvals and evidence, with selected decision workflows that can be reviewed and learned from. Its enterprise- context foundation includes source snapshots, lineage, canonical entity mappings, versioned metric definitions and access policies, and reconciliation records. Its shipped decision engines cover inventory/service-level policy and rolling-horizon re-optimization.

Ambition: Connect governed enterprise meaning to predictions, uncertainty, alternatives, constraints, decisions and measured outcomes, then reuse reviewed learning in later decisions. Company OS is not yet a complete enterprise semantic layer or a generally proven closed-loop decision system. Broad operational and financial scorecards, and demonstrated improvement to later decisions or business outcomes, are not general current capabilities.

Company OS helps a company turn what it knows and what it wants into work that people and AI can carry out safely.

It brings the company’s goals, definitions, responsibilities, tasks, approvals, evidence, and learning into one operating system. AI agents are important participants, but they are not the whole product.

Company OS is the institutional operating system for human and AI work.

The idea in one minute

A company does not run on data alone. It also depends on shared meaning:

• what a customer, sale, risk, or successful outcome means;
• how performance is measured;
• who owns each decision;
• which actions require approval;
• how work moves from a request to a result;
• what evidence supports the result; and
• what the company should remember or improve afterward.

Most companies spread this information across people, documents, dashboards, software, policies, and conversations. Company OS is designed to connect those pieces so the organization can understand how it works, delegate work, reconstruct important outcomes, and improve over time.

What Company OS does

Company OS has six responsibilities:

1. Understand the company. Keep company identity, goals, roles, tasks, knowledge, and business definitions connected.
2. Organize the work. Turn a request into owned work with a clear outcome and history.
3. Set the boundaries. Decide which person, agent, model, or tool may do what.
4. Coordinate execution. Route work to a person, Codex, Claude Code, OMP, or another approved runtime.
5. Return proof. Keep the result with its evidence, actions, approvals, and execution record.
6. Help the company improve. Preserve approved knowledge and turn recurring friction into reviewable improvements.

The simple operating loop is:

Business need
→ company context and definitions
→ owned task
→ authorized person or agent
→ work and evidence
→ approval when required
→ result or action
→ memory and improvement

What Company OS is not

Company OS is not simply a chatbot, a model, or a coding-agent harness.

• A model can reason and generate an answer.
• A harness such as Codex, Claude Code, or OMP gives a model tools and an execution loop.
• Company OS supplies the company context, task, authority, policy, evidence, and durable outcome around that work.

The agent session can end. The company task and its record remain.

Company OS also does not mean that AI may run a company without supervision. Access and actions depend on the tools, policies, credentials, and approvals that an organization has deliberately configured.

Choose the right front door

Company OS currently has several operator surfaces. The Zeron-based company-os-desktop app is the only customer shell (ADR 0004), but its packaged self-serve release gates are not complete. The other surfaces remain internal or development references.

Surface	Best for	What you do there
Company OS Desktop (company-os-desktop, Zeron-based)	Nontechnical customer front door; packaged release blocked today	Install, complete guided company/identity/model setup, run work, recover, update, and uninstall without technical tooling.
Company Console in a browser	Internal operators and capability/API reference during migration	Create or select a company, describe work, review tasks, results, approvals, memory, costs, and system health.
API and command-line tools	Administrators, developers, and automations	Start services, integrate other systems, diagnose the runtime, and automate governed workflows.

The repository also contains an Electron shell under web/company-console-desktop. It packages the browser Console for development. It is non-canonical and will not ship as a customer fallback. See ADR 0001.

Start with the Company Console

From a source checkout, run one command from the repository root:

./company-os

It starts or reuses local services, opens the Workspace, and prints the one ready URL. scripts/company-os-up.sh is the private supervisor behind that command, not a second setup step.

On the Start page:

1. Create a company or select the company you are authorized to use.
2. Choose an available model connection, or use the interface-only mode to explore without executing agent work.
3. Describe one small, verifiable outcome.
4. Run the proof task.
5. Review the result, evidence, task record, and trust summary.
6. Open Approvals when Company OS says a human decision is required.

A useful first request is:

Review the current blocked work. Explain the three most important blockers, cite the evidence you used, and propose the next action for each. Do not change external systems without asking me first.

The complete startup and troubleshooting instructions are in Company OS workspace and chat launch.

Use the Company OS Desktop app

Before first use

Company OS Desktop is currently a native preview, not a verified public App Store or notarized-download release. From a source checkout, use ./company-os desktop: it launches Zeron, which starts or attaches to the local Company OS service itself. The signed public desktop distribution remains gated; no customer should be asked to manually start web services before opening the eventual packaged app.

If the app displays Authorization required, it has stopped safely. Ask the Company OS administrator to connect the company and your authority. Do not work around this boundary by switching to an ungoverned runtime.

The current technical build and authority contract are documented in the Company OS Desktop fork note.

The everyday workflow

1. Open Company OS. The app starts or reconnects to the local Company OS service.
2. Choose a project. Select the folder or workspace where the work belongs. A project keeps sessions and file changes grouped around the same context.
3. Start a new chat. Each chat is a durable work session. Give it one outcome rather than a series of unrelated requests.
4. Keep Company OS policy selected. This is the governed route. Codex, Claude Code, OMP, and other available runtimes may appear as execution choices, but Company OS remains responsible for identity, permissions, policy, and receipts.
5. Describe the outcome. Say what you want, which information matters, what must not happen, and what proof you expect.
6. Watch the work. The app shows messages, tool activity, status, proposed changes, and available evidence as the run progresses.
7. Review before accepting. Read the result and inspect changed files, evidence, and receipts. A fluent answer is not proof by itself.
8. Handle human decisions. When policy requires approval, the work pauses. Use the authoritative Company OS approval surface supplied by your organization. The desktop viewport does not manufacture approval locally.
9. Stop when needed. Use the visible stop control to cancel a run. A cancelled run remains part of the work history.
10. Return later. Sessions and their local records survive an app restart. Company OS remains the authority for company tasks, approvals, evidence, and terminal outcomes.

A good desktop request

Use four short parts:

Outcome: Prepare a decision memo on the three launch options.
Context: Use the files in this project and the approved company sources.
Boundaries: Do not publish, purchase, email, or change production systems.
Proof: Cite the sources, show assumptions, list risks, and recommend the next decision.

You do not need to specify a model or tool unless the choice matters. Describe the business outcome and boundaries; let Company OS route the work through an allowed runtime.

What the main desktop controls mean

Control	Meaning
Projects or spaces	Folders and work contexts available on this device.
New chat	Starts a new work session in the selected project.
Company OS policy	Uses the governed Company OS route rather than a direct, development-only agent connection.
Conversation	Your request, the agent’s response, and visible execution updates.
Changes or diff	Proposed file changes that should be reviewed before acceptance.
Receipts and evidence	Records that help explain what ran, what was used, and what outcome was produced.
Stop	Cancels the current run without erasing its history.

What happens after you press Send

The desktop app is a window into Company OS. It is not the company database and it does not grant itself authority.

Desktop request
→ authenticated company and user
→ task and runtime policy
→ approved agent harness and model
→ scoped tools and company context
→ result, evidence, and proposed changes
→ approval or terminal outcome
→ Company OS ledger

The desktop keeps a local session cache so the interface remains useful across restarts. Company OS remains authoritative for companies, identities, permissions, tasks, approvals, evidence, receipts, and final outcomes.

Memory, papercuts, and improvement

Company OS keeps different kinds of learning separate:

• Memory is curated knowledge that the company has chosen to reuse.
• Papercuts are append-only evidence of recurring operational friction.
• Tasks are governed commitments to produce an outcome.
• Receipts record what happened during important work.
• Skills and runtime changes are reviewed improvements to how future work is performed.

A papercut may later become a task, lesson, skill improvement, or runtime fix. It does not silently become company memory.

What is available now and what is still developing

Company OS is an active, self-hosted product under development. The repository contains a working local company ledger, Company Console, governed task and agent-run paths, memory and governance surfaces, multiple runtime integrations, receipts, and a native desktop preview.

Some parts of the larger vision remain partial or require stronger production evidence, including the native desktop’s public packaging and login experience, full live approval and ledger projection coverage in the desktop, broad semantic and metric management, and end-to-end organizational self-improvement. Advanced evaluation and self-reflection systems should be treated as governed improvement lanes, not as proof that the production system changes itself automatically.

The current release decision is tracked by the nine Company OS maturity gates. Missing evidence is a failed gate, not a skipped check. The report also keeps execution integrity separate from outcome quality: a correctly settled run is not automatically a correct or useful result.

The shortest explanation

Company OS connects what a company knows, what its work means, who has authority, how people and AI execute, and what evidence proves the outcome.

For the technical architecture, continue to the operator handbook. For the complete current implementation map and known gaps, see Complete Company OS.