Early Warning.
Partnerships don't fail overnight — they fade. Messages get slower, milestones slip, decision-makers move on, and by the time the quarterly business review reveals the problem it's too late to fix without restarting. CORTEX Early Warning watches seven continuous synapse-pattern signals across your active partnerships and flags the ones trending toward churn weeks before the decline becomes obvious to either party.
The seven signals
Exponential weighted moving average of messages-per-week on both sides of the partnership. Baseline is established over the first 30 days post-acceptance. A 50% drop over four consecutive weeks triggers a caution flag; a 70% drop triggers critical. Both inbound and outbound are weighted because a silent partner is still a disengaging partner.
Median time from your message to their reply, computed over a rolling 14-day window. Establishes a baseline during onboarding, typically 4–24 hours for active partnerships. A doubling of the baseline for two consecutive weeks is flagged; a tripling is critical. Because latency grows gradually, this signal often fires before any human notices the change.
Rate at which shared milestones — defined at deal creation or contract signing — are checked off. A partnership scheduled to hit three milestones per quarter that hasn't hit one in 30 days is stalling; 45+ days triggers critical. Context matters here: the system knows which milestones are blocked on external dependencies (counsel review, regulator approval) and excludes those from the velocity calculation.
Percentage of weeks where both sides are active on the platform during the same week. Healthy partnerships run at 85%+ overlap. Below 40% overlap over four weeks is flagged — even if messaging cadence looks fine, misaligned rhythms often precede churn because neither side is present when the other has momentum.
Your partner's SHIELD Trust Score trending down (>5 point drop in 14 days), or specific sub-scores breaching thresholds (Compliance <70, Activity <50). This is the hardest signal to game because the sub-scores are computed from independent sources — consent state, KYB monitoring, activity logs, peer feedback.
A key contact at the partner organization departs. Detected via LinkedIn monitoring (with appropriate consent) and Market Signal ingestion. Leadership churn is one of the strongest predictors of partnership failure because institutional relationships live in people, not org charts. Currently on the Y1 roadmap as platform coverage expands.
The partner appears in an adverse Market Signal — funding winter, regulatory enforcement action, layoffs, product deprecation affecting their partnership offering. Surface this alongside the partnership health so the team is never blindsided. Ingestion coverage for this signal expands through Y1.
How health scores roll up
Each active partnership gets a single 0–100 partnership health score, computed as a weighted combination of the live signals:
health = 100
- message_cadence_penalty (up to -25)
- response_latency_penalty (up to -20)
- milestone_velocity_penalty (up to -25)
- engagement_overlap_penalty (up to -15)
- trust_score_drift_penalty (up to -15)Scores ≥75 are green. 50–74 caution. Below 50 critical. The trend arrow on each partnership reflects the 14-day delta — a partnership at 72 trending down to 60 gets more attention than one at 68 stable.
Suggested next actions
Every flagged partnership comes with a suggested action — not generic advice, but a specific intervention calibrated to which signals are firing. Examples:
- Message cadence drop + response latency stable: "schedule a brief sync to re-establish rhythm — momentum has faded without breaking"
- Milestone velocity stalled + engagement overlap drop: "both sides are disengaging — consider a formal quarterly review with executive sponsors present"
- Trust Score drift on partner's side: "your counterparty's compliance posture has changed — verify nothing material has happened before your next contract milestone"
- Response latency 3x baseline + leadership signal fired: "your primary contact may have left. Identify their replacement before sending the next significant request"
Notifications
Transitions matter more than steady states. Early Warning notifies you on state changes, not every scoring update:
- Green → Caution: email + in-app notification to the partnership owner.
- Caution → Critical: email + in-app notification + listed in SHIELD Alerts inbox as High severity.
- Recovery (Critical → Caution or Caution → Green): in-app notification so the owner knows their intervention worked.
API surface
Open Early Warning weekly.
A 10-minute Monday review catches 90% of what would otherwise become a 90-minute "what happened?" fire-drill a quarter later.
Open CORTEX →