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MARKETPLACE SKU BASELINE COMPANION · WORKER’S GUIDE PRE-DEPLOY · COMING SOON

Validiti Shepherd

The baseline Validiti companion. A familiar LLM-style conversational surface wrapped around your signed substrate reads — a worker’s guide to what your business has stored. The accessible entry point; Aris is the flagship V.I. tier when citation discipline matters end-to-end.

What you get

A sealed binary that wraps a familiar conversational layer around your business’s own substrate reads. Ask a plain question; Shepherd answers using what your records hold, in language a worker can use on the job. It reads what your business has read and surfaces it back — the entry-level way to make your institutional memory talk back to you. For rigorous citation on every word and structural “I don’t know,” step up to Aris — the flagship V.I. Same substrate underneath; different discipline at the surface.

01 · What you can do with it

Four outcomes Shepherd delivers from day one. A V.I. companion that reads your records, remembers what matters, and answers only with what you actually have.

Talk to it like a colleague

Plain-language conversation, persistent across days and years. Shepherd remembers the threads of every conversation as if it were the colleague who had been there.

It reads everything you read

Documents you save, articles you read, decisions you log. Shepherd integrates them into the institutional memory and they become part of how it answers next.

Cite the source, always

Every answer carries the source it came from. The document, the decision, the conversation. Verifiable; never invented.

Honest forgetting

You decide what stays and what goes. Shepherd shows you what it remembers and lets you remove items. Verifiable forget — nothing kept against your will.

02 · What a companion conversation looks like

A short exchange the way a colleague who has been in your business for ten years would handle it. Shepherd cites what it knows. Says so when it doesn’t.

Live representative outcome · Shepherd conversation
Asking your institutional memory about a past decision
The conversation a small business owner has with a long-tenured employee — except this employee never forgets, never embellishes, and always points to the file.
Conversation thread · Shepherd 2026
You
Why did we drop the Brennan contract last year? I can’t remember if it was a payment thing or a scope creep thing.
Shepherd
It was both, but mostly scope creep. The trigger was the third change-of-scope request in February without corresponding change-orders. You wrote in your decision log on 2026-02-18: “Scope expanded twice without budget; can’t carry a third.” Payment was 47 days late at termination, but that wasn’t the cause.
Cited from: decision-log/2026-02-18.md · project-files/brennan/scope-history.md · ar-aging/2026-feb.csv
Chain link: #18,442 · signed by your Mark identity
You
Was there any communication with Brennan after we terminated?
Shepherd
Not in your records. The only post-termination entry is the final invoice you sent on 2026-02-22. No reply on file. If there was a verbal call, it’s not in the record store. I won’t guess.
Searched: email archive 2026-Q1, call log 2026-Q1, decision log 2026-Q1
Result: one record found (final invoice); no inbound communication after termination
What a Shepherd companion buys you: the institutional memory of a long-tenured colleague, with the discipline to cite the file rather than invent a story. The first answer named the actual document, the actual date, the actual quote. The second answer said “not in your records” instead of inventing a follow-up that might have happened. That’s a V.I. companion.

03 · What’s in the sealed binary

Conversational companion layer

Plain-language conversation persistent across days, weeks, years. Shepherd remembers the threads as you talk.

Records integration

Reads documents, decisions, conversations, emails, scans — whatever you point Shepherd at. The institutional memory grows with the business.

Citation chain on every answer

Every claim Shepherd makes carries the source. The document name, the date, the section. Verifiable, reproducible, signed.

Verifiable forget

You see what Shepherd remembers. You can remove items. The forget is structural — not just a flag on a database row.

Composes with Aris + Chronicle

Aris does the V.I. reasoning; Chronicle holds the records; Shepherd is the conversational surface over both. Same V.I. discipline throughout.

Persona-aware

Shepherd can run multiple personas tuned to different roles in your business — legal, ops, customer-relations, founder. All citing your records, none inventing.

04 · For your business

Three customer types where Shepherd replaces “ask the long-tenured employee who might remember” with a structural institutional memory.

Small business founder

The memory of the business you built

Every decision, every customer, every supplier conversation. The history of why you do what you do, queryable in your own voice. When you sell or step away, it stays.

Multi-generation family business

The grandparent’s knowledge, kept alive

The accumulated wisdom of decades of operating, captured as a citable record. The next generation reads what the first generation actually wrote.

Civic + volunteer organization

Continuity across changing volunteers

Volunteer roles turn over. The institutional memory doesn’t. Shepherd holds the records of how to do what you do, signed and citable.

05 · Pricing · install

Marketplace fabric pricing · baseline companion tier
$99 · per year
Baseline of two tiers: Shepherd $99/yr (worker’s-guide companion, LLM-wrapped substrate reads) and Aris (Flagship V.I.) $199/yr (citation discipline on every output). Or included in All-Access at $499/yr covering every Validiti Marketplace SKU. Cheap on purpose — Shepherd should be the way most workers first meet Validiti.
Install path: we supply hardware preconfigured, or we install on yours. Self-install is not offered — integrity is built in at install time.
Coming Soon at launch Notify-at-launch list active. No live downloads until the secure binary ships.

06 · Trust · what we will not do

01
Never co-mingled

Shepherd runs on your hardware against your records. Your institutional memory is yours alone — not pooled with anyone else’s, not training a shared model.

02
Verifiable forget

You see what Shepherd remembers and remove what you want. The forget is structural; we cannot retain copies after you remove.

03
Hyperscaler exclusion

License terms exclude majority-owned subsidiaries of top-tier hyperscale cloud providers. Your companion is not absorbed into closed cloud platforms.

04
Cite or be silent

Shepherd will not invent answers. When your records are silent, Shepherd says so. The honest empty is structural, not a fallback.

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Shepherd · Marketplace

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