The AI gave a customer a 20% discount. Who said it could?

The renewal was routine. An eleven-person digital agency, a client on a €42,000 annual retainer, a sales lead with thirty of these to get through before the quarter closed. She opened ChatGPT, pasted the email thread with the client, attached last year's pricing deck, and asked for a renewal offer. The deck still carried a slide from a campaign that ended in March: "20% loyalty discount on multi-year renewals." The thread had the client saying, politely, that they expected some recognition for staying. The AI put the two together and wrote an offer with 20 percent off, which came to €8,400. She read it, it sounded like the agency, and she sent it. Two days later the founder saw it in a forwarded reply, with the client thanking the agency for its generosity.

Nobody had given that discount. When the founder asked who said it could, the honest answer was that nobody had ever said anything. The short version: when AI gives a customer a discount without approval, the usual cause is that nobody wrote the approval limit down. Company Brain holds those limits as Mandates, next to your company's facts, and delivers them to Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot and Cursor through MCP, so a connected assistant checks a drafted offer against the real limit before it sends.

Why did the AI give a customer a discount without approval?

Because nothing told it there was an approval to get. The model had a deck with 20 percent in it and a thread with a client asking for something. An offer at 20 percent off is a reasonable draft from those inputs. I wrote earlier about two teammates getting different answers from AI, and this is a cousin of that problem with a larger invoice attached. Stale context supplied the number. The missing limit let it through.

Before AI, the sales lead would have typed the number herself. And somewhere between the deck and the keyboard she would have paused, because 20 percent felt big, and that feeling was the agency's entire approval system. She would have walked over to the founder's desk. He would have said ten, maybe twelve for a two-year term. The pause had never been written down. It lived in her stomach and in his.

AI removed the pause. The draft arrived finished, with the number already typed in, and the moment that used to send her across the office happened inside a model that had no idea the office existed.

So the 20 percent was a symptom. The limit had no written form anywhere an assistant could read.

What does an approval limit for an AI assistant need to say?

More than "ask before discounting". It needs the parts a sensible founder carries in his head, written out. Who holds it. What kind of action it covers, in the company's own words. How much the holder may give alone. How much more they may give with an approval, and whose. The currency. When it starts and when it expires. Who covers for the holder on holiday. Who owns it and when it gets reviewed.

In Company Brain that is one object, called a Mandate. The agency's read like this. Action: discount. Holder: Mari, the sales lead, with one more Mandate each for the two other account leads. Alone: up to €2,000 on an annual renewal. With Jonas's approval: up to €6,000. Above €6,000: no. Valid 1 January to 31 December, in euros. Deputy: Priya when Jonas is away. Owner: Jonas, reviewed each December.

That is the whole discount policy, and it fits on an index card. Ten minutes of arguing produced it, mostly about whether €2,000 was too low, and the arguing was the useful part. Three people found out they had three different numbers in their heads for a limit each believed was shared.

A Mandate, like every typed object in Company Brain, is a proposal first, and a person approves it before it holds. Mandates never count toward the fact limit, so the free plan, with its 50 company facts and 1 curator and the whole team connected, leaves room for every limit the company has.

What happens when the AI checks the offer against the Mandate?

The sales lead's ChatGPT is connected to the agency's Company Brain, and the connection instructions tell every connected assistant to call the check tool before it quotes, decides, sends or commits. The assistant checks the draft: action discount, actor the sales lead, amount €8,400 in euros.

€8,400 is above the act-with-approval ceiling of €6,000, so the answer is refuse. The verdict comes back with the rule, the reason, and the value that would pass: €6,000 with Jonas's approval, or €2,000 alone. It also comes back with a decision request the assistant can file to Jonas, so the ask lands in his queue and nothing has been sent.

Had the draft said €5,000 off, the answer would be flag, naming Jonas as the approver. Had it said €1,800, pass, and the Mandate's track record count goes up by one, so the agency can see how often the limit gets used. If Mandates exist for discounts and none of them names the person acting, the check flags with "No Mandate covers this actor for this action". And if the draft carries no amount, no currency or no actor, the check answers cannot check and names the missing input. Cannot check is never treated as pass.

Every check is logged with its verdict and whether the caller went ahead, so the next time someone asks who said it could, the answer has a timestamp on it.

Who at your company may give a discount alone, and up to what?

Ask it out loud this week. Most founders answer inside five seconds, and then the person who sends the quotes gives a different number. That gap is the one the agency fell through.

Then write three Mandates: discount, quote, and whatever else your people commit to in writing, a delivery date, a scope change, a refund. For each one, name the holder, the two ceilings, the approver, the currency and the dates. Propose them and have someone approve them. If the plain facts are still unwritten, my guide to writing your first 50 company facts comes first, and the creative studios page shows what an agency's facts look like once an assistant has them.

The agency honoured the 20 percent, by the way. Jonas decided the client was worth it and said so in writing. It was the first time that limit had existed anywhere outside his head, and he seemed a little relieved to have it out.