# Natural Language is the New Ontology

> How our partners own their transformation.

_Jack Weissenberger · 2026-08-14_

## Lost in Translation

Traditional software puts other people between you and the systems your business runs on. Encoding business knowledge took special expertise, so you hired translators: engineers, consultants, configuration specialists.

When their engagement ended, process control went with them. Businesses were left with software that does not reflect how work gets done, configurations nobody touches, and spreadsheets managing the workarounds. The last mile to production drags, because what looks ready to the engineer is full of holes only the operator can see. Software that businesses bought to simplify their processes becomes the bottleneck they work around.

## In Your Own Words

The current state: The CFO of a restoration company is responsible for the company’s commissions. The written policy runs nine pages long: it includes rates by role, an aging schedule, a collections cadence, and overhead tiers. Alongside the standard policy, the company manages manual overrides and mentally keeps track of verbal commitments to bonuses awarded, unwritten and changing every few months.

Traditional software would have taken that policy and encoded it into an Ontology of typed fields and configuration tables. When a rule changes in a way the system did not expect, someone files a ticket, and a week later an engineer updates the system.

At Ciridae, we see a better option. Inside a carefully engineered harness, models can execute rules written in natural language, reliably enough for production, on decisions that matter.

Instead of someone else translating her words into the system, her words become the system. The policy she sends her salespeople is the policy the platform runs:

**File: commission.docx**

- **Commissions Policy and Procedures**
- Commissions are earned on projects that are complete and have been collected in full. Payout occurs the month following the month of collection.
- Rates applied to commission calculations for each employee can be found in the rate sheet. If an employee is not listed on the rate sheet, they will not earn a commission under this policy.
- If a person is assigned to a project in more than one role, they should only earn the higher of their assigned rates.
- The only exception is Dana; Dana is eligible to earn her rate on jobs she sources herself, including jobs outside of her assigned territory.
- Coordinators are not commission eligible under this policy.
- **Assistant Rates**
- Assistants are paid a percentage of the job commission, as set per pairing on the rate sheet.
- One assistant remains on a legacy draw against commission rather than the standard structure. He is the only exception to the above rule.
- If an assistant is the primary on an individual job, they should be paid the full standard rate instead of their assistant rate.
- **Commissions Reporting**
- Commissions should be sent to the individual's supervisor for approval by the 5th of every month and include the following information: invoice number(s), client name, job number, invoice date, payment received date, and total job cost.
- All job costs must be entered into the job system with matching invoices/receipts prior to the submission of commissions (i.e. if any invoice for any cost on the project is missing, do not submit that job for commission).
- Supervisors are to submit the approved and verified commission report to Payroll by the 12th of every month for final review and sign-off.
- If errors are found on the report during review, it will be returned to the individual to correct and resubmit the following month. No commission will be paid out to that individual that month.
- **Payment of Commissions**
- Small jobs collected after 90 days will be paid at 60% of the commission rate. Small jobs collected after 120 days will not be paid.
- Large jobs collected after 90 days will be paid at 75% of the commission rate, after 135 days at 50%, and after 180 days at 25%. The above percentages apply to everyone, no exceptions.
- For timing purposes, collection days should be calculated between the invoice due date and the fully collected date. Do not use the completion date as part of this calculation.
- Projects fully collected prior to the previous quarter should be excluded from calculations at run time. Assume these have already been paid out in prior runs.
- **Collection Process**
- 30 days: phone call to the client, then a follow-up email recapping the call. Should include a request for a hard date for invoice processing. Upload the email and the client response into the tracker.
- 45 days: all of the above. Copy the internal AR team. Should include a request for written acknowledgement from the client.
- 60 days: all of the above. Copy your direct manager and the CFO. Acknowledge the aging of the invoice in the email.
- 75 days: reach out to the AR team to request the notice of intent to lien. 90 days: follow up to confirm the lien has been filed.
- Post 90 days: communicate with the client every week and keep leadership informed and involved. It will be at the discretion of leadership to take legal action.
- If it is determined during the collections process that paperwork was not submitted on time, no commission will be paid out to anyone on that job.
- **Overhead Application**
- Overhead will be calculated on the total pretax invoice amount and added to job costing before profitability and commissions are calculated. The percentage steps down by job size from the small-job rate to the large-project rate.
- Trade work will use its own flat overhead rate. Any cost incurred under a job number will use the overhead applicable to that job number.
- Creating separate job numbers for the purpose of reaching a lower overhead tier will not be permitted and will justify consequential action.
- **Failure to Comply with Procedures**
- 1st offense: written warning from the direct supervisor. 2nd offense: official write-up submitted to HR. 3rd offense: commission on the project forfeited. 4th offense: termination of employment for that individual.

When the rules change, she edits the document. An edge case is a sentence, not a project.

With this, she owns her transformation. Because the person who understands the process controls it, the software moves at the speed of the business. The document accumulates the expertise of the operation, and judgment that once lived in one head scales through a system people trust.

Our systems compute paychecks today, and we have applied this approach beyond commissions, to scheduling crews under constraints only the dispatcher knows, dashboards described by the person who reads them. Wherever the rules live in someone's words, we engineer the system to run on those words.

## Better Problems

LLMs are not a silver bullet. Simply pasting the CFO's document into ChatGPT and asking it to run commissions will not work.

- Context. The document assumes a reader who knows the business. The colleague who ran commissions filled the gaps from experience; a model starts with none of it.
- Trust. Ask a model the same question twice and you can get two different answers. The old configuration table was miserable to change, but it never surprised you.
- Ambiguity. A real business runs on hundreds of rules, written for people rather than machines. Some quietly contradict each other. Some are underspecified. A model will faithfully execute all of it, holes included.

Experienced engineers still have to do the work: connecting the system to the context and data of the company, shipping an intuitive UI for people to input undocumented tribal knowledge, and catching drift with evals before model outputs reach a paycheck.

None of this is easy, but these are better problems than the ones they replace. The old guarantees were weaker than they looked. A misconfigured table is wrong until payroll notices the difference, and software that does not evolve ends up unused, the business falling back on messy, error-prone human processes. The new problems, solved once, stay solved for every rule written after.

## Own Your Transformation

If you run a business: partner with us. We sit with your operators, ask the right questions, probe the workflow design, capture knowledge that was never written, and rebuild the operation around it.

If you are an engineer: stop encoding other people's knowledge into configuration. Come build the harness that lets their words run the system. Join us.

> The business knowledge was always yours. Now the system is too.