My online presentation ended somewhere close to midnight for me, but was really just before lunch to the party at the other end - in a country in South America. Two hours and then some, which is a long time to be presenting to people I have never met in person, in a market I have never set foot in, late on a Monday evening that was for them still a Monday morning with coffee.

I closed the laptop and sat there for a while in the dimmed evening light of my study room. Just absorbing.

I thought back to when this started, about six months ago. A current client and mutual contact had at the time asked if I had issues with providing SaaS - our customer loyalty app ecosystem, in fact - to their sister business in South America. Not being an idiot, I said no, we have no issues at all. Then came the initial introductory emails. They knew about what we were doing for the local counterpart - a multibrand automotive distributorship with a country-wide aftersales network - and they themselves being in a similar business shape, felt that our solutions seemed to answer more questions than their own global principal-provided incumbent but dated systems. Then came some back and forth over email, WhatsApp, and so... preso time to their stakeholders. Night for me, morning for them, due to the 12 hour timezone difference.

The presentation had gone well. They had asked good questions - the kind that tell you they've read the pitch deck properly - and near the end one of them asked something that I have been turning over ever since.

From your point of view, what are we missing from the quotation? What would make this a real engagement tool?

That is, in commercial terms, a wide open door. They were inviting me to upsell to my own quotation. I have two extensions to this platform - lead management and aftersales queue management systems - both of which they would eventually want, one of which was live in another market and doing exactly what they were describing. The right words were sitting right there.

I told them, though, that nothing was missing at this time. They had enough to start with for now, and I didn't want to push anything else at them until they'd worked with me for a while.

Everything Except the Technology

A few weeks before that call, this was nothing but a list of questions in my head on the drive home.

The managing director of that market had known my work from a previous posting. He asked his team to reach out. That was the entire brief - a company on the other side of the world, in a language I don't speak, wanted to talk about deploying a platform I'd built.

The technology was not the part I wanted to chew more on. It was everything else.

What currency do I bill in: theirs, or something neutral? Where would arbitration sit if this ever went wrong? Are there withholding taxes? Is there VAT, and does a reverse charge apply, and does any of it create a permanent establishment problem for a Malaysian company? Can a Malaysian company even contract with an entity there without tripping over something? Does the group we now belong to have a policy about certain territories that I don't know about? What language does the agreement need to be in - and if it's Spanish, is it the Spanish or a local variant with its own conventions? How do people there prefer to be spoken to in a business setting? What does their used car market look like, because that changes everything about how an ownership app behaves?

I was rambling through all of this out loud in the car when my wife, entirely reasonably, said I should check with legal, finance, and all the commercial guys.

She is a financial controller at a large listed company. In her world that answer is not only correct, it's really the only correct answer. There are specific functions and teams for this. You raise it, they come back to you, and that's the system working.

In my world it was the wrong answer, and I had to sit with why for a bit.

It isn't that our legal and finance people aren't good, mind you. They're very good. It's that almost none of those questions sit anywhere near their day job, and I knew that if I walked in with the raw list I would get, at best, silence, and at worst a delay long enough to kill the conversation before it started. (At time of writing this, I did end up sending a full list of questions anyway, just to cross the Ts on what I eventually came up with, as you'll see here. That was months ago. I still haven't heard back on some of those questions, and I want to be clear that I don't hold it against anybody - they are being asked about a domain nobody in the building has ever had to work in.)

So the day after that drive, I did the research myself. With help.

Advisors, not oracles

I started thinking of it as a council.

The old Chinese warlords kept a room full of learned men and let them argue. Not because any one of them was right, but because you cannot see a decision from every side by yourself, and hearing three competent people disagree in front of you is the fastest way to find the edges of a problem. The warlord listened. Then the warlord decided, and it was his neck.

I was not then nor now a warlord, but I decided to take a leaf out of their books anyway and built my own council. Mine, though, aren't a group of old men with long white beards reciting analects to each other - they are three different AI models, which I run against each other on purpose (or rather, to put it plainly, I ask the same questions to all three, then copy over some selected replies from one to the other to let them agree or refute). One tends to ramble and give me breadth. One is direct to the point of curtness. One is an enthusiastic golden retriever and I have learned to discount its optimism by a large percentage. Ask the same tax question to two of them and you get two different framings, and somewhere in the gap between the framings is the thing you actually needed to understand.

Cao Cao or Liu Bei would have absolutely loved this, because what I got and they didn't was speed and patience. Their advisors had to go away and find out. Mine answer immediately, and - this is the part I genuinely value most! - they will let me ask the same question eight different ways, in slightly stupider language each time, without ever once making me feel like, dey, should already know that by now dey.

That is how I came to a view on arbitration, on currency, on the tax treatment, on how the ownership market there actually behaves and what that means for a platform built around a vehicle record. None of that would have been available to me five years ago at any speed I could have used.

What the council doesn't get a vote on

But go back to that question at the end of the presentation.

If I had asked the council whether to name the two extensions, I know exactly what I'd have got. Reasonable arguments. A structure for positioning it as a roadmap rather than an upsell. Probably some quite good phrasing.

And it would have been the wrong call, because the thing I was actually reading in that moment wasn't commercial. It was that these people were about to walk into a room and defend a business case for an unknown vendor from a country most of their colleagues have never dealt with. What they needed from me was to be small enough to approve. Anything I added to the quote that night, I'd be adding to their burden of persuasion, not to my revenue.

(Hilariously, I also absolutely knew that, after the call, if I were to tell my AI that I didn't upsell and it went right, the AI would agree that was the right call; and if I did upsell and that went well also, the AI models would also absolutely agree in hindsight that it was a "masterclass of negotiation and presentation". In that way, this modern council sometimes did resemble the ancient warlord's councils quite a bit.)

The council of AI is extraordinary. It has made me faster and broader and considerably less afraid of things I don't know. It goes and does the things that I used to spend ages just doing, and gives me time to do more of the thinking. But that's the important bit. The thinking. The judging. The weighing, and making the calls. Those always belong to the human in the equation - the warlord who is supposed to be going out there, charging in physically - because these venerable AI gents will not be out there with us.