Personas
AI personas: roles that load the right knowledge at the right moment
A persona is a working role with a condition for each playbook. How personas let AI tools pick the right skill or prompt without anybody choosing it.
Once a team has more than a handful of skills and prompts, a new question appears: which one should be used for this task? People should not have to remember. The AI should know. That is what a persona is for.
What a persona is
A persona is who to be: a working role like Tech Lead, Account Executive or Support Specialist. It has two parts:
- A description of the role, in plain words, like a short job description.
- A list of playbooks, each with a condition that says when to load it. "Load the positioning skill when researching an account. Use the proposal prompt when an offer is needed."
A persona is not another kind of playbook. It does not copy the skills and prompts it uses; it links to them. Update a skill once, and every persona that uses it works with the new version.
How a persona decides
A persona loads one playbook at a time, only when its condition applies. Ask it to research a prospect, and it loads your positioning. Ask it for a follow-up after a call, and it adds the follow-up prompt. A reply to a quick product question may only need the product facts.
If a task needs something none of its playbooks covers, the AI can look for a fitting playbook in your library and use it within the role.
The conditions are written in prose, and the AI tool does the routing. Nothing runs in the background, and no hidden step happens after the answer.
Where personas work
- In sqemes Chat, you pick a persona for a conversation and it stays the role for the whole chat. Or you leave the picker on Automatic, and the AI picks a fitting persona when one applies.
- Over MCP, tools like Claude Code, Cursor and Codex can find and load a persona while they work.
- The browser extension works with skills and prompts. Personas live in sqemes Chat and in MCP tools.
A persona can also name the services the role works with, such as Notion or Linear. In sqemes Chat, choosing the persona brings each person's own connection into the chat and says when one is missing.
Personas teams start with
Most teams begin with one persona per role that uses AI every day:
- Social Media Manager: brand voice for every post, the campaign brief when a launch is coming.
- Account Executive: positioning for account research, the proposal prompt for follow-ups.
- Tech Lead: coding conventions while code is written, the review checklist for pull requests.
- Support Specialist: answers from the product knowledge skill, the escalation prompt when a case needs a person.
Writing your first persona
Write the role in three or four sentences. Then add the two or three playbooks the role uses most and give each a clear condition. Test it with real tasks and check which playbooks it loads: sqemes Chat shows them under every answer. Sharpen the conditions where it picks the wrong one.