Why Your AI Employee Needs a Playbook
Every time you open Claude and start a new session, it starts fresh. No memory of your business. No understanding of who you serve. No idea what tools you have connected. That is the problem the claude.md file solves.
Think of the claude.md file as the employee handbook for your AI team. It is the single document that every AI employee reads before doing any task. It contains your business identity, your audience, your tech stack, your communication style, and the rules your AI team follows. Without it, every session starts blind.
“You still need that claude.md file to let your AI people know about who you’re serving and basically what they’re expected to do or not expected to do.”
Where the Claude.md File Fits in Your AI Team
If you watched the previous video on creating an org chart for your AI employees, this is the next step. The org chart defines who your AI employees are and what departments they belong to. The claude.md file is the foundation layer that sits underneath all of it.
In James’s setup, there is a chief orchestrator (the top-level AI agent) and multiple departments, each with employees that specialize in one skill. The claude.md file gives all of them shared context about the business — so no matter which employee picks up a task, it already knows the basics.
Step 1: Pick a Dedicated Project Folder
This is the most important decision before you create your first claude.md file. Do not put it in your root directory. Create a dedicated folder for your business.
Why does this matter? If you put the claude.md in the root, it affects every project on your machine. That means if you have a second business, a client project, or a personal folder, your AI employees will read the wrong playbook. Folder-based isolation keeps each project’s AI context separate and clean.
What to do: Create a folder for your business (for example, “MyBusiness” or your company name). This is where your claude.md file will live, and Claude will only use it when working inside that folder.
Step 2: Ask Claude to Create the File
Open Claude Desktop and switch to Cowork mode (the task mode, not the chat mode). Then simply say: “Help me create a claude.md file.”
Claude will ask you a few questions:
- Scope: Should this claude.md apply everywhere or just this folder? Choose just this folder.
- Priority: Should it focus on employee roles, company info, audience profiles, or all of the above? Choose all of the above for a complete playbook.
- Data sources: Should it pull real data from your connected tools? If you have connectors set up, say yes — it will build the file from actual data instead of placeholders.
- Detail level: How detailed should the skills and employee section be? Start with “light” and expand later.
“I didn’t write this. I didn’t open a file name or folder. I just asked Claude to create it.”
Step 3: Let Claude Auto-Discover Your Setup
This is the part that surprises most people. When you ask Claude to build the claude.md file, it does not just ask you questions and type up your answers. It actively looks around your system.
Claude will scan for:
- Existing claude.md files in other folders
- Your user preferences and settings
- Installed skills (your AI employees)
- Connected tools and MCP servers (your software integrations)
- Any existing project context
It maps everything it finds and uses that information to generate a claude.md file that actually reflects your real setup — not a generic template.
What the Generated Claude.md File Contains
The generated file covers seven sections:
- Who you are — Business identity and mission
- Who you serve — Your audience and ideal customer profile
- Tech stack — All software and services Claude has access to
- MCP servers — Connected external tools and their capabilities
- Skills and employees — All installed AI employees with their specialties
- Communication style — Your brand voice and tone preferences
- Workflow rules — Naming conventions, publishing rules, and guardrails
This single file gives every AI employee the context they need to produce work that fits your business — without you having to explain everything from scratch each session.
Scaling Up: Department-Level Files
A single claude.md file works well when you are getting started. But as your AI team grows — more employees, more departments, more specialized tasks — that single file becomes too large.
“If you have a big company, you’re going to end up with this huge single file. So that’s why I break it down into departments. And it also makes Claude get better answers because it doesn’t get confused by trying to keep everything in its head at once.”
The solution is to break the claude.md into department-level files. Each department gets its own playbook with specific context for its employees. Shared information (like brand voice and audience profiles) lives in a central location that all departments reference.
This approach has two benefits. First, each AI employee gets only the context it needs — not everything about the entire business. Second, Claude produces better results because it is not trying to hold irrelevant information while working on a focused task.
Your Next Step
If you have not created a claude.md file yet, do it now. Open Claude Desktop in Cowork mode, pick a folder for your business, and ask Claude to help you create one. Start with a single file and expand into departments as your AI team grows.
This is part of building your Campus AI Operating System — the courses on the TrainingSites campus (Campus AI Blueprint, Build Your First Agent, and Meet Your AI Team) walk through this process step by step.
