Built for
Every company runs on knowledge nobody wrote down
Cairn is not industry software, and these are not separate products or separate prices. The test is simply whether more than a handful of people depend on knowledge that only exists in conversation — which is almost every company past its first dozen hires. The examples below just help you recognise yourself faster.
Client work that runs on one senior person's judgement
Agencies & professional services
Every account is run slightly differently, the reasons live with whoever set it up, and the handover when they leave is a calendar invite and good intentions. Cairn records how each engagement actually runs while the person who runs it is still there.
Runbooks that stopped matching production months ago
Software & technology
On-call docs describe a deploy path that changed two quarters ago, and the real sequence lives in a pinned Slack message. Cairn asks the engineers who actually ship, and flags the runbook pages that no longer match what they said.
Protocol on paper, workaround in practice
Healthcare & clinical operations
Intake, scheduling, and escalation have documented protocols and local adaptations that nobody has written down. Cairn captures the adaptation, names who confirmed it, and shows where practice has drifted from the protocol it is audited against.
Controls you have to evidence, not just describe
Financial services & insurance
An auditor wants to know who approves what, under which threshold, and when that was last confirmed. Cairn holds exactly that: the control as the people operating it describe it, with provenance and a date against every statement.
Shift knowledge that never reaches head office
Manufacturing, logistics & field ops
The people who know why a line is run a certain way are on a shift pattern and rarely in a meeting. Cairn reaches them by email or Slack in a minute at a time, instead of waiting for someone to write a standard operating procedure.
High turnover, long institutional memory
Nonprofits & public sector
Volunteers and fixed-term staff rotate out faster than documentation gets written, and grant reporting depends on process detail nobody recorded. Cairn keeps the memory even when the people change.
Not on the list?
It still applies. The pattern does not change by industry — only the specific process that nobody wrote down does.