We’ve been thinking about what a company’s constitution would look like.
It started as a practical problem. At Activate Intelligence we’ve been building what we call the Backbone skill, the single document that tells every one of our AI agents who we are, what we believe, how we work and how we make decisions. Everyone gets a version of it. You can talk to it, ask it questions, argue with it. It’s the base layer that everything else sits on.
The thing is, once you have a document like that, you notice it’s not really a manual for the AI. It’s the founding document of the whole organisation. The same text that tells an agent how we make decisions is the text that tells a new colleague the same thing. It’s what everyone, person or machine, checks against before they act. So on a call this week I said it out loud: the Backbone skill is basically a constitution.
And a constitution isn’t a mission statement. A mission statement is a poster in the lobby. A constitution is the thing every agent, human and AI, reads from before they act. Same base layer for all of them. When a person and a machine disagree about what the company would do, they’re not appealing to their own guesses, they’re appealing to the same text.
Part of why this suddenly matters is the AI. A purely human organisation can run on principles that are never written down. People pick them up by imitation, by watching what gets praised and what gets quietly ignored, by osmosis in the corridor. It works, sort of, with all the limits you’d expect: the rules are fuzzy, they drift, and nobody quite agrees what they are. An AI agent doesn’t have that luxury. It has no corridor to hang around in. If you don’t give it clear context, it doesn’t improvise its way to your culture, it just fails, or worse, it confidently does the wrong thing. The moment you put agents to work, the unwritten rules have to be written. That’s uncomfortable, and it’s also useful, because it forces you to actually decide what you believe.
Here’s the part we keep coming back to. The most important thing a constitution contains is the rules for changing itself.
That sounds like a technicality and it’s actually the whole point. If the founding document is fixed, it rots. If anyone can edit it at any time, it means nothing. What you want is a document that says, in writing, how it can be amended, by whom, through what process. Adding something, removing something, changing something, each has a defined path. Once that mechanism exists, the document can stay alive without falling apart, and you don’t need a founder standing over it forever.
We are all the founding fathers and mothers. That’s roughly how I put it. Nobody owns the constitution, everybody signs it, and the signature that matters is agreeing to the process for changing it. After that, every agent in the company, whether it runs on coffee or on tokens, works from the same base and improves it the same way.
We like this framing for a boring reason: it’s easy to explain. I used almost exactly the same words in a client pitch the morning before, and it landed immediately. People already know what a constitution is. They know it’s meant to outlast the people who wrote it. They know amendments are a normal, healthy thing and not a crisis. You don’t have to teach any of that.
It also connects to something we’ve been circling for a while. We keep talking about the Backbone skill as the “why”, the base layer, with a data layer underneath it and a fast, messy layer of experiments on top. The experiments come and go. The data changes every day. The constitution is the slow layer, the part that’s supposed to change carefully and rarely, and to say clearly how it changes when it does.
What makes this feel bigger than us is that it isn’t really about Activate, or about any one company. It’s a general shape. Any organisation that’s going to have humans and AI agents working side by side needs a single, self-amending founding document they all read from. The companies we’re doing this with are just instances of it. The idea is the interesting thing, not the logos attached to it.
This isn’t finished thinking. We’re not sure yet how thick a constitution should be, or how you stop the amendment process from becoming its own kind of bureaucracy. But we’re fairly convinced the shape is right: one base layer, shared by people and machines, that contains the rules for changing itself.
More on this as we actually build it.
