Training Claude on a Business

Owners hear me say I train Claude on their business, and the careful ones ask what the word means. It is the right thing to ask. In AI engineering, training means building the model itself, and that is not what happens here. Nothing inside Claude changes when I take on a client.

So here is the plain definition. Training, in my work, means teaching. It is what you would do with a talented new marketing director. Hand them information about the company until they can act for you without asking.

Everything comes down to what that writing holds.

The internet's version takes 15 minutes

Search for how to train AI on your business and the recipe is short. Upload a few writing samples. Write a page of instructions. Several guides promise a working setup inside 15 minutes.

That's a good setup. It teaches the model your formatting and tone, and it beats a blank chat.

But it can only teach what you handed it. A few published samples show how your polished pages sound. They hold almost none of what you know. A system taught this thinly writes smooth, unfamiliar work, because the layer it drafts from is the same public layer every competitor's model holds.

That type of training will not teach an AI to write human-quality copy. It will not produce posts, videos, or books with depth and insight. That work will not stand out on social media, on Google, or to chatbots hunting for sources worth citing.

Fifteen minutes buys a formatting assistant. Knowing your company takes a curriculum.

The curriculum starts in the interview chair

The curriculum is the body of documents the system studies before every working session.

What I build for clients is an interview-trained marketing system. Hours of recorded interviews capture your stories, your reasoning, and your voice. Owners who prefer talking alone record guided monologues instead. From those recordings I write more than a dozen custom brand guides. The guides keep improving as work ships, so every produced piece makes the next one better.

The interviews come first because the teaching material lives in your memory and nowhere else. The corrected transcripts become permanent source files, quoted for as long as we work together.

What the guides teach

Each guide records a different set of decisions, written until a stranger could act on them.

One holds the two or three clients every piece is written for. It runs down to how each of them decides to buy. One holds your philosophy: the positions you take and the claims you refuse to make. One writes your voice down as instructions anyone can follow. Another states what you sell, for whom, at what price.

Together the guides work as the decision system every asset derives from. A full set runs past a dozen documents.

The guides and the transcripts then live inside a Claude project. The project reads them at the start of every working session. Nothing gets memorized into the model. The system knows your company the way a well-run firm knows anything. It is written down, and the writing gets read and internalized.

The teaching shows up in ordinary moments. Ask an untrained chat for a services page and it either asks you twenty questions or invents the answers. Ask a trained project and the draft arrives already informed. It knows what you sell, what it costs, which client it is for, and which claims you refuse. Knowing the company means not being asked again what the company already answered.

The teaching never fully stops

The first production weeks are also teaching weeks. When a draft misses, I correct the draft, then revise the guide that let the miss happen. The correction lands twice, once in the piece and once in the rules. The next draft starts from a better curriculum.

Capture continues too. New client questions, new cases, and new numbers get recorded in short monthly sessions and folded into the source files.

What training will not do

Training cannot teach what you never said. When the interviews stay shallow, the guides stay thin, and thin guides produce work that reads like anyone.

Training does not retire judgment either. A taught system still drafts, and a person still reviews every draft before anything ships.

The first page of the curriculum

Companies that get little back from AI usually skipped the teaching. The tool was present. Nobody wrote the curriculum it was supposed to study.

So read anything your marketing published this month and ask what it knows about you that a stranger would not. Your cases. Your numbers. The advice you give that contradicts the textbooks. If the answer is nothing, the tool is not the problem. There was no curriculum yet.

Then ask your best client what you know that nobody else they work with seems to know. Their answer will help you get started.