What Dock does for consulting and agency teams
Dock is the persistent workspace where an agent drafts the client deliverable, records the rationale, and waits for a named partner to sign off before anything reaches the client. Notion holds the wiki. Asana tracks the plan. Drive stores the deck. Dock holds the interpretive trail in between: which slide an agent drafted, which numbers it pulled, which partner approved, which client it belongs to.
How the architecture sits
Notion, Asana, Google Workspace, Harvest, and Slack stay the system of record for the raw engagement data: brief, task list, deck, time entries, client thread. Dock is the system of record for what the agent interprets from that data, the prioritized edits, the draft analysis, the reviewer sign-off, the audit log. Each Dock row carries a pointer back to the platform record (notion_page_id, asana_task_id, gdrive_file_id), the agent identity, the decision, the reviewer, and the timestamp. The agent re-fetches engagement data via fresh API reads when it needs current state. Dock holds the persistent interpretive layer that survives across sessions, partners, and client renewals.
The Dock surface: a deliverable review table
| client | engagement | deliverable | drafted_by | rationale | reviewer | status | notion_page_id |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Northwind | Q2 ops diagnostic | Slide 14, cost-to-serve | agent.research.mei | Pulled FY24 SG&A from Drive, segmented by SKU family, flagged top three drivers | partner.ravi | approved | n_4f12a8 |
| Aldercroft | Brand refresh | Voice guidelines, v3 | agent.copy.lex | Reconciled discovery interviews with current tagline audit, proposed two tone shifts | partner.dani | changes_requested | n_91c4d2 |
| Helio Labs | Growth audit | Channel mix memo | agent.analyst.kai | Joined Harvest hours against Asana deliverables, isolated channels with negative margin | partner.ravi | pending_review | n_7a3e09 |
Each row is one unit of interpretive work. The reviewer column names a real partner.
A worked workflow
A growth audit lands in Asana for Helio Labs. The research agent reads the brief from Notion, pulls billable hours from Harvest, and re-fetches the channel attribution model from Drive. It drafts a channel mix memo and writes a new row into the Dock deliverable table: name, rationale, pointer to the Notion working page. Partner Ravi opens the row, edits one segment of the analysis, marks status approved. The consent gate releases: the agent publishes to the client Notion space and notifies Slack. The row stays. Months later, when the client asks how the channel call was made, the rationale and reviewer are still there. See agent collaboration for the row-as-coordination pattern.
Why it matters
Consulting and agency work is judged on the trail. The AICPA Code of Professional Conduct requires consulting members to document due professional care; firms have read that as a working-papers obligation since long before AI drafted any of them. Source Global Research's consulting market reporting keeps surfacing the same client complaint: outputs without a chain of reasoning erode trust. The 4As research library shows the same pattern in agency land, where client churn rises when reviewer attribution is unclear.
Dock adds the layer those platforms were never built for: durable agent-by-reviewer attribution per client. The agent identity is real, the partner signature is real, the row survives the engagement. For the identity model see agent identity. For the compliance surface see agent audit and compliance. Adjacent verticals: Dock for research, Dock for design, and Dock for marketing.
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FAQ
Does Dock replace our Notion engagement wiki?
No. The wiki stays in Notion. Dock holds the agent-drafted analyses and partner sign-offs that point back via notion_page_id.
How do we attribute agent work to a specific consultant? Every Dock row carries the agent identity and the human reviewer. Partner Ravi's approval is recorded against Ravi, not a generic service account.
Can the client see the rationale column? Only if you choose to share it. The default is internal. Most firms keep rationale as a working paper and publish only the approved deliverable.
What happens when an engagement ends? The rows persist. Years later, the deliverable, the rationale, and the reviewer signature are still queryable per client.
