A brief does not need technical vocabulary. The best ones we receive are written by the person who does the task today, in the words they would use to explain it to a new colleague. If you can do that, you can write a brief.
What belongs in it
The task, in one sentence
Not "we need something for our documents" — but "every morning about eighty scanned letters arrive, and someone reads each one to decide which of our six teams handles it." One sentence, with a verb. If the sentence has an "and" in the middle, you probably have two commissions, which is fine — write two briefs.
Real examples
Five to ten real documents, requests or texts — including two awkward ones. The awkward ones are worth more than the rest combined: the letter that is half a form, the request that could be two topics at once. A model is only as honest as the examples it was judged against.
Rough volumes
"About eighty a day, more on Mondays" is precise enough. Volumes decide the model class and the hardware question more than any other line in the brief. Nobody will hold you to the exact number.
Where the result should land
A folder structure, a shared mailbox, an Excel sheet, your ticket system — name the place. "The model's answer should appear as a new row in our intake sheet" tells us more than any feature list.
Your constraints
Two questions matter: may the material leave your office, and what hardware exists? "Nothing leaves the building; we have a spare workstation" is a complete answer and already narrows the design to a handful of sensible options.
A complete example
Task: About 120 delivery notes arrive as PDFs each week. Someone types the supplier, date and eleven item lines into our stock sheet. The model should read each note and add the rows.
Examples: Ten notes attached — eight clean, one coffee-stained scan, one from a supplier whose layout changed last month.
Volume: 120 a week, roughly 500 a month.
Lands in: Our stock sheet (Excel), one tab per week.
Constraints: Material may be processed at the studio. A normal office PC is available for running it.
That brief is five lines long, and from it we can name the model class, the build time and a fixed price without asking a single follow-up question. That is the standard to aim for.
What you can leave out
- Model names and sizes. Choosing the class is our job. If you have a preference, say why — the reason matters, the name does not.
- Accuracy percentages. "It should be 99% right" sounds precise and is not. Tell us instead what a mistake costs: a misfiled letter is annoying, a wrong item line in the stock sheet is expensive. That ranking shapes the evaluation.
- The future. "Later it should also do X" is useful over coffee, not in the brief. A model built for one task does it well; a model built for five does them all averagely.
- Apologies for your material. Every archive is messier than its owner thinks. Ours is too.
If you are stuck
Call us. Describing the task aloud for ten minutes usually produces everything a brief needs — we write it down, send it back to you, and you correct it. That conversation is free, and it is how about half of our commissions start.