Your process lives in three people’s heads. One of them is leaving.
Onboarding takes six weeks because the wiki was last true in March. Cairn captures the real process from the person doing it, and shows it to the next person inside the actual tool — not in a document about the tool.
Three sentences from ops leads.
“Nobody updates the wiki, including me.”
What Cairn does:
Nothing to update by hand. Capture records the process as it is performed, and drift detection flags the step that broke when the tool changed underneath it.
“New hires read about the system instead of using it.”
What Cairn does:
Sidekick opens beside your CRM or ERP and shows the internal guides pinned to that exact screen — then walks the new hire through the real UI, advancing on their real clicks.
“The runbook is in a doc nobody can find and half of it is confidential.”
What Cairn does:
One knowledge graph, three audiences. The internal runbook is enforced at retrieval, so it cannot surface in a customer-facing answer even if someone links to it.
Capture the processes that would hurt most to lose, first.
Not a migration project. Each week produces something usable on its own, so you can stop at any point and still be ahead.
- Week 1Capture the bus-factor-one workSit with the person who is the only one who knows. Record three processes while they do them. That is the risk retired.
- Week 2Pin guides to screensMap guides to the URLs where they are needed. Sidekick now surfaces the right runbook inside the tool, not in a tab someone has to remember.
- Week 3Deploy Sidekick org-wideThe capture extension doubles as the viewer, deployable by Chrome Enterprise policy. Internal copilot answers with citations from internal knowledge.
- Week 4Give every process an ownerFreshness SLAs with named owners. Past the date, it is flagged — so "who owns this" has an answer before someone asks.
Capture, the internal audience, and Sidekick
The rest of the product is there when you need it. These are the parts this job leans on.
Browser, desktop, and voice. Desktop matters here: internal process often lives in software that never had a web version.
The internal audience, with per-audience redaction profiles, versioning, and a governance console showing content × audience as a matrix.
Walk a new hire through the real interface. This is the difference between onboarding in two weeks and six.
Sidekick: the extension as a side panel inside your CRM or ERP, answering from internal knowledge with citations.
When your ERP vendor renames a button, the guide that referenced it tells you — instead of a new hire discovering it.
Where Cairn is the wrong choice
Cairn documents software. It does not document the physical world.
- Warehouse, manufacturing and field processes that happen away from a screen cannot be captured beyond voice dictation, which produces prose rather than a replayable walkthrough.
- Desktop capture is Windows and macOS. If your internal tooling is Linux-only, that surface is not built.
- Cairn is not a project management or task tool. It documents how work is done; it will not track who is doing it.