The advice was always out there. It just never reached the person carrying the decision.

For many things, you should. They are remarkable general tools. Meridian is deliberately not a general tool. The difference shows up in four places.

Where the advice comes from. A general chatbot draws on everything on the internet, so its business advice is an average of everyone’s. Meridian advises from twelve in-house playbooks covering strategy, finance, operations, people, negotiation, and more, written here from the published literature in each field. It tells you which playbook it’s using.

What happens first. Ask a chatbot a business question and you get an answer. Ask Meridian and you’ll often get a question back. “Should I hire?” can’t be answered responsibly without knowing your utilization and your margin. Diagnosing before prescribing is the whole method.

What you leave with. A chat gives you a transcript. A Meridian session ends with a verdict or a plan, the math behind it, the tradeoffs named, a logged decision with a revisit condition, and a memo you can hand to a partner or a bank.

What happens after. A chatbot forgets you when the tab closes. Meridian writes down what you decided and checks back to see how it went. No general tool follows up, and follow-through is where most business advice dies.

Keep them. Meridian is not trying to take the engagement. It is built for everything around it. You check your own oil; you don’t rebuild your own transmission. You change the furnace filter; you call the tech for the compressor. Most business decisions are that first kind: the pricing question, the scheduling mess, the “can I afford this hire” math. Booking your consultant for those is like booking a mechanic to top up your washer fluid, so in practice those decisions just go unmade.

When the big one comes, the acquisition, the lawsuit, the restructuring, Meridian says so plainly and helps you prepare. It drafts the brief you’ll bring, so the expensive hour is spent on judgment instead of on someone reading your email. Your consultant will notice you showing up sharper. Consultants tend to like that.

Then Meridian makes them faster, because the slowest part of their job is the part it automates: gathering. The Gather Requirements workspace sends a smart form to your team, asks the follow-up questions a good interviewer would ask, flags where your people disagree, and drafts a first-pass requirements document with every line traced to someone’s own words. Your analyst starts from evidence instead of a blank calendar of interviews.

If you’re a manager who has never had access to an analyst at all, which is most managers, this gives you one.

Trust it the way you’d trust a sharp junior consultant: on the strength of the work shown, not on faith. Meridian shows its math on every number. It names the tradeoffs on every recommendation, including the downsides of the option it recommends. It cites its sources when it checks the live web. It attaches a revisit condition so its own advice comes up for review.

It also knows its limits out loud. Every session carries the same line: Meridian is an AI advisor. Verify important decisions with a qualified professional. For legal, tax, and bet-the-company questions, it will tell you to bring in a human and help you get ready for them.

It won’t pretend confidence it doesn’t have. It won’t give you a plan without checkpoints. A plan without exit conditions is a wish. It won’t replace your lawyer, your accountant, or your judgment. It exists to make your judgment better informed and written down. It won’t flatter you. If the numbers say the second location is a bad idea, that is the answer you’ll get, with the math attached. And it won’t confuse the filter with the compressor. It knows which problems are maintenance and which need a professional, and it tells you which kind you’re holding.

Your files are read for one purpose: to advise you inside your own sessions. They are stored with your account, and inside Meridian a file is only shown to you when you are signed in. Storage is private: there is no address that will open one of your files, not even a secret one. Reading a file takes a credential that never leaves Meridian’s server, and the server checks the file is yours before it sends you a single byte. The limit worth knowing is the ordinary one: anyone who can get into your account can see them, and sign-in runs through your email. Nothing you upload is shared with other users, and nothing you upload is added to Meridian’s playbooks. Memos and forms become visible to other people only when you create a share link.

Delete a session and its files are deleted from storage with it. You can also delete individual attachments at any time, and you can delete your whole account from Settings, which removes your files from storage and then every record: sessions, memos, decisions, intake forms, and the decision ledger. Logged decisions survive a deleted session, but not a deleted account. Meridian runs on Anthropic’s Claude API. Under Anthropic’s commercial terms, what you send is not used to train their models.