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Chief: What are Concepts? — Concepts surfaced from your files

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The payoff: themes pulled out of your files for you

A Concept is a recurring theme Chief finds running through your Library — an idea, topic, or entity that shows up across multiple files. Instead of reading everything to figure out what your documents have in common, you open the Concepts page and see the themes already surfaced, each one backed by the exact passages it was built from. Concepts turn a pile of files into a map of what they’re actually about.

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A worked example

Chief: What are Concepts? — A Concept opened, ready to chat
Say you’ve uploaded your market-research and strategy files. On their own they’re just documents. Chief reads across them and surfaces a Concept named Strategic Tech Market Consulting — because that theme keeps recurring. Open it and you can chat with the Concept straight from its details, asking “What’s our positioning for high-tech sectors?” and Chief answers grounded in that theme’s source passages — not the whole Library.

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Every Concept is backed by citations

Chief: What are Concepts? — Built from citations in your files
A Concept isn’t a guess. Each one is built from citations (called seeds) — real chunks of text drawn from your files. When you open a Concept’s details, you see a line reading “This Concept is built from N citations”, the source file each passage came from, and the passages themselves, so you can always trace a theme back to where it came from.
ℹ️ Good to Know: Most Concepts are surfaced automatically by Chief as it reads your files. You can also define your own. Concepts you create yourself carry a “Created by you” badge.

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What you can do with a Concept

Chief: What are Concepts? — Explore Concepts in the graph
  • Explore it visually in the Concept Graph, where related Concepts sit near each other.
  • Chat with it to ground a conversation in just that theme’s source passages.
  • Visualize it to turn the theme into a graphic.
  • Trace its citations down to the file each passage came from.
🚀 Pro-Tip: Scanning Concepts is the fastest way to get oriented in an unfamiliar Library. Before you read a single file, open the Concepts page to see the themes the documents share.

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Frequently asked questions

Concepts are surfaced from your files, so you need files in your Library first. Add some, give Chief a little time to read them, and Concepts will appear. You can also define one yourself.
No. Labels are tags you put on files, and Collections are saved Label filters. Concepts are themes Chief discovers inside the content of your files, each backed by citations — they’re about meaning, not tagging.
From your own files. Each citation (seed) is a chunk of text pulled from a file in your Library, with a link back to the source file.
Yes. Generating a Concept takes a few seconds, and up to a few minutes for larger data sets. It appears in the list once it’s ready.