Weekly Executive Briefing

The weekly executive briefing is Burrow's Monday-morning summary of the week's signal — alert volume, week-over-week change, dominant categories, top at-risk identities, and an AI-written 200 to 300 word narrative. It is the artefact that goes to management, compliance leads, and anyone else who needs the signal without working alerts day to day.

What is in the briefing

Each briefing has four parts:

Header tiles

Four numbers at a glance:

• Alerts this week — total count across all severities.
• Week-over-week change — percentage delta vs the previous week.
• Critical + High count — the alerts that actually demanded operator response.
• Active incidents — Investigations still open at the end of the week.

AI-written narrative

200 to 300 words of plain prose summarising what the data shows. Topics covered:

• Top concerns — which categories or identities dominate the week.
• Trend — is volume up or down vs prior weeks, and why.
• Repeat offenders — identities that have shown up in multiple weeks.
• Recommended actions — concrete tuning, exception, or follow-up suggestions.

The narrative is generated by Burrow's AI engine using the deterministic numbers as input. As with all AI narration in Burrow, an AI safety check verifies every number in the narrative against the source data and falls back to a plain template if anything was invented. The briefing uses a stricter verification level than per-alert text because it reaches executives.

Top entities

A table of the week's highest-risk identities — risk score, alert count, and a one-line behavioural summary. Click any row to open the Identity dossier for deeper context.

Top categories

A table of the week's most-firing alert categories with counts. Useful for understanding where the noise (or signal) is coming from at a glance.

When the briefing is generated and sent

• Generated: automatically every Monday at 06:00 local time.
• Emailed: to every recipient on the Notifications list whose Weekly briefing gate is on (see Configuring alert email recipients).
• Archived: every briefing is kept on the Briefing page in the dashboard for retrospective review.

Viewing past briefings

1. Open the Burrow dashboard → Briefing in the left navigation.
2. The current week's briefing renders in-page.
3. A list of archived briefings (one per week) is available below — click any to view it inline.

The in-page version is identical to the emailed version, useful for forwarding to someone who is not on the email list or for printing as part of a monthly compliance pack.

Who should be on the briefing list

• SOC lead — to see what was triaged this week.
• Compliance / audit lead — for the regulatory-facing summary.
• Risk lead — for tracking trends.
• Executive sponsor (CISO, CTO, or equivalent) — for the management view.

Each can have a different per-alert Min severity setting; the Weekly briefing gate is independent. A recipient with Min severity = Critical (so they never see per-alert emails) can still receive the weekly briefing.

When the narrative falls back to a template

You will occasionally see a briefing where the narrative section reads like a generic "Total alerts this week: N. Categories: X, Y, Z." instead of natural prose. That is the AI safety check fallback — the AI's first narrative attempt contained an invented number or name and was rejected. The deterministic numbers, top entities, and top categories are still authoritative.

If this happens frequently, raise a support ticket; the engineering team uses these reports to improve the verifier.

Pairs well with

• Suggestions panel on the Rules page — review on Monday alongside the briefing.
• History page — see what operator actions were taken during the briefing's week.
• Forage — drill into specific identities or sites mentioned in the briefing.

See also

• Configuring alert email recipients — where you set who gets the briefing.
• Email types Burrow sends — the briefing alongside the three other email types.
• Tuning a noisy rule — actioning the recommendations from the briefing's narrative.

Need help? support@smikar.com.