Notebooks

Most AI products give generic answers because they have no idea who you are, what you sell, or how your business actually works. Notebooks (formerly called Business Brain) changes that. It's your organization's knowledge layer - a central place where you store documents, sync data sources, and build the context that lets your Flows answer like an insider, not a stranger.

When an end user asks one of your Flows a question, the Flow can search your Notebooks for relevant information and weave it into its response. Instead of guessing, your Flows reference your real documents, policies, and data.

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The mental model

Think of your Notebooks as a smart filing cabinet that your Flows can read from on demand.

• You put things into it: documents, websites, knowledge from connected apps.
• FormWise organizes it: each source gets broken into searchable pieces and indexed.
• Your Flows read from it: when relevant to a question, they pull the right pages out and use them in the answer.

You don't have to tell the agent "look in section 3.2 of the handbook" - it figures out what to look for based on the conversation.

Note - Notebooks hold knowledge. Memory (described below) is what an individual end user has said in past conversations. They serve different purposes; you'll probably use both.

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What Notebooks aren't

Notebooks are often confused with adjacent ideas. Quick clarifications:

• Notebooks aren't a chatbot. They don't talk to your users - your Flows do. Notebooks just make them smarter.
• Notebooks aren't memory. Notebooks hold your org's shared knowledge. Memory holds an individual end user's history with your Flows.
• Notebooks aren't magic. If a fact isn't in your Notebooks, the agent won't know it. Garbage in, generic out.
• Notebooks aren't your CRM. They don't track records or pipelines - they store knowledge. For action-taking, see Composio or Webhook nodes.

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What lives in your Notebooks

Notebooks have several components, each accessible from this section of the sidebar:

• Knowledge Sources - Upload documents (PDFs, Word docs, text, and more), add website URLs, or paste in raw text. FormWise reads and indexes everything. Learn more
• Connectors - Link Google Drive, Dropbox, Notion, and other apps so content stays in sync without manual re-uploads. Learn more
• Memory - Long-running notes the AI keeps about individual end users - their preferences, prior asks, the details they don't want to repeat. Learn more
• Personalization - A related but separate layer: Suites have their own personalization fields that end users fill in once, which every Flow in that Suite can then reuse as context. See Suite Personalization.

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How agents use Notebooks

You don't write code to query your Notebooks. You toggle Notebook access on for an Agent node in a Flow (or attach specific sources to a specific Agent), and it searches your Notebooks automatically as part of answering.

Curious about the search mechanics? Read How Notebook Search Works for the friendly mental model - chunking, indexing, retrieval - without the jargon.

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Why it matters

Without Notebooks, your Flows only know what the underlying language model was trained on - general knowledge from the public internet. With Notebooks, your Flows become experts on your business: better answers, fewer mistakes, less hallucination, and a far more useful experience for the people using them.

A small team with well-curated Notebooks often beats a large team without them. The leverage is real.

Explore Notebooks