Getting IQ's help on a network playbook

What a network playbook is

If your business belongs to a franchise network or association, your franchisor or association HQ can push a playbook, directive, recommendation, or experiment straight to your IQ account. It shows up as a plan you can read, act on, and report back to them from inside your own platform, not a PDF that lands in your inbox and disappears. This article covers two things: the contextual IQ chat suggestions that appear on a playbook page, and how the IU cost of chatting with IQ about a sponsored playbook is billed.

Verinode does not decide whether you adopt a playbook. It surfaces what your network sent you, gives you IQ to think it through, and leaves the acknowledge, work-on, decline, or complete call to you.

Where to find it

A Network Playbooks entry appears in the sidebar, between Decisions and Action Plans, whenever your franchise network has pushed you at least one playbook that still needs your attention. It carries a badge showing how many are open. If nothing is currently pending your action, the entry does not show at all, so it never sits there as dead furniture.

Click it to land on /network/playbooks, your inbox of everything HQ has sent you.

The playbooks inbox (/network/playbooks)

At the top of the page:

• A small label, From your franchise network.
• The page title, Network playbooks.
• A one-line description: "Playbooks, directives, and recommendations your franchisor has sent you. Open each to acknowledge, work on, decline, or complete."

Below that, your playbooks are split into two groups:

• Active (N), anything still in the pushed, acknowledged, or in_progress state. This is the list that needs you.
• Closed (N), anything declined or completed.

Each row in either group shows:

• Kind, one of Playbook, Directive, Recommendation, or Experiment, plus the sending group's name (for example, "Playbook · Acme Restoration Group").
• The plan's title.
• A two-line preview of the plan body, if one was written.
• A status pill on the right: New (this is what pushed reads as here, since the operator hasn't acted on it yet), Acknowledged, In progress, Declined, or Completed.
• How long ago it was pushed, in plain language: "today," "1 day ago," "14 days ago," or "2 months ago."

Click any row to open its detail page.

Empty state. If your network hasn't sent you anything yet, the page reads: "Your franchise network hasn't sent you any playbooks yet." Nothing further to do, this is not a broken screen, it just means no plan has flowed in yet.

The playbook detail page (/network/playbooks/[planId])

Opening a row takes you to the full plan. From top to bottom:

Pills row. Three small labels: the plan kind (Playbook, Directive, Recommendation, or Experiment), the current status (Pushed to you, Acknowledged, In progress, Declined, or Completed), and "From <Group Name>" so you always know who sent it.

Title. The plan's headline, as your franchisor wrote it.

Detail. The body of the playbook itself, in your franchisor's own words. If they pushed it without extra detail, this reads: "Your franchise network sent this playbook (or directive, recommendation, experiment) without additional detail."

Sponsorship banner (only when HQ funded it). If your franchisor committed an Intelligence Unit budget specifically for AI work on this playbook, a banner appears reading "Sponsorship, <Group Name> is covering AI help on this playbook," with three figures:

• Budget, the total IUs the sponsor committed to this playbook.
• Used, how much of that sponsor budget has been drawn down so far.
• Remaining, budget minus used, floored at zero.

Underneath: "Open the IQ panel from this page to use the sponsored IUs. Your own balance only kicks in once the sponsor cap is reached." This banner only appears at all when your franchisor actually funded the plan; unsponsored playbooks show none of this.

Your notes. If you left a note the last time you changed status (most commonly on decline), it shows here under "Your notes."

Lifecycle. A four-column strip of dates: Pushed, Acknowledged, Started, and a fourth column labeled Declined or Completed depending on where the plan landed. Any date not yet reached shows a dash.

Update status. Buttons for the moves you're allowed to make from your current status:

• From Pushed to you: Acknowledge, mark In progress, or Decline.
• From Acknowledged: mark In progress or Decline.
• From In progress: mark Completed or Decline.
• Completed and Declined are terminal, no further buttons show.

Choosing Decline opens an inline text box: "Why are you declining? (Optional, your franchisor can see this.)" with Cancel and Confirm decline buttons, so you're never asked to explain yourself in a popup that vanishes if you hesitate.

1. 1Open a playbook from the Active list.
2. 2Read the Detail section, this is your franchisor's guidance in full.
3. 3If HQ is sponsoring AI help on it, note the Budget / Used / Remaining figures so you know how much room you have before your own IU balance is touched.
4. 4Open the IQ panel from this exact page and use one of the contextual suggestions below, or ask your own question.
5. 5Move the status forward as you work it: Acknowledge, then In progress, then Completed, or Decline with a note if it doesn't apply to you.

IQ's contextual suggestions on this page

Every IQ chat surface (the web panel, and the mobile equivalents) reads the page you're on and changes its starter suggestions to match. On any /network/playbooks page, whether the inbox or an individual plan, IQ's header reads "Playbooks From Your Network" and it offers four starting prompts as tappable pills:

• "Which playbooks apply to me?", this is the "apply to me" prompt. Ask it from the inbox and IQ reasons about which of your open playbooks actually fit your business, size, and situation, rather than treating every push as equally relevant to you.
• "Walk me through this playbook", the "walk me through" prompt. On a specific plan's page, this asks IQ to unpack the Detail section step by step in plain language, what it means for your operation, and what doing it well looks like.
• "How do top-quartile peers run this?", pulls in Verinode's benchmark layer so the playbook isn't just your franchisor's word, it's checked against how the strongest peer operators actually execute the practice.
• "Turn a playbook into an action plan", the "turn into an action plan" prompt. This asks IQ to convert the playbook's guidance into a concrete, trackable plan you can work from, the same kind of plan-and-decide surface used across the decision workspace.

These four pills only show when you open a fresh IQ conversation on the page, that is, before you've sent your first message. Tapping one sends it immediately as your first message, it does not just fill the text box for editing first.

If your account is in its first 30 days, an extra pill, "How do I use this?", appears ahead of the four above so a brand-new operator can ask for an orientation before diving into a specific playbook question.

How sponsored billing routes

Every message you send IQ costs Intelligence Units (IUs), tracked against your own monthly allocation. Network playbooks add one wrinkle: your franchisor can pre-fund the AI work on a specific playbook, and when they do, that sponsor budget pays before your personal balance is touched at all.

Here is exactly how it routes:

• IQ recognizes the moment you're chatting from a specific playbook's page (a URL of the shape /network/playbooks/<plan id>).
• It looks up whether your franchisor set aside a sponsor budget for that plan and whether any of it remains.
• If sponsor budget remains, that turn's IU cost is drawn from the sponsor pool first, up to whatever is left in the budget. Only if the turn costs more than the remaining sponsor budget does the leftover spill onto your own balance, so partial coverage is possible on a single message, not just an all-or-nothing switch.
• Once the sponsor budget is fully used (or if your franchisor never funded this plan in the first place), your own IU balance covers the conversation exactly as it would anywhere else in the platform.
• Chatting with IQ from anywhere else, the Feed, Decisions, Margin, and so on, is never affected by this. Sponsorship only applies while you are actually on that playbook's page.

What a message costs in the first place still follows the platform's normal tiers: a plain back-and-forth chat turn is the lightest tier, asking IQ to save a full action plan or bring in extra specialist research costs more, and a Deep analysis request multiplies the cost further. Sponsorship changes who pays, not what it costs.

Best-practice example

Your franchisor pushes a Playbook titled "Same-day mitigation dispatch," with a sponsorship banner showing Budget: 500 IU, Used: 0 IU, Remaining: 500 IU. From the Active list, you open it, read the Detail section, and tap "Walk me through this playbook." IQ breaks down the dispatch sequence your franchisor described and flags where your current process likely differs. You follow up by asking "How do top-quartile peers run this?", and IQ compares the guidance against the strongest peer operators' execution patterns. Satisfied it fits, you tap "Turn a playbook into an action plan," which hands you a concrete plan you can work from immediately. All of that conversation draws from the 500 IU your franchisor committed, not your own balance. You mark the playbook In progress, work the plan over the next two weeks, and mark it Completed once your crew is running the new sequence.

Related reading

• The decision workspace
• Acting on decisions
• The Feed
• How benchmarks work

Data sources