What we learn from teams selling, servicing and hiring — and where AI actually earns its seat. Written by the people who build and implement it.
Every vendor shipped an assistant this year. Almost none of them will let the assistant you already pay for touch the record. That is backwards, and the shift toward open protocols is why the "AI inside the app" era is already ending.
“An assistant that can’t write to the record is a search box with better manners.”
Two arguments we've had with customers often enough to write down.
The pilots that failed last year did not fail on the model. They failed because quotes lived in one system, dispatch in a spreadsheet and complaints in three WhatsApp groups — so the agent confidently acted on data nobody trusted.
Per-seat pricing assumed one human, one login. Now half the industry is quietly moving to consumption meters you cannot forecast. We priced it the boring way instead: a seat is a seat, whoever is sitting in it.
Four things Indian teams asked us about more than anything else.
With hundreds of millions of users in India, WhatsApp is not a channel you migrate teams off — it is where your customer already is. The mistake is letting it be the only place the conversation exists.
E-invoicing now covers the overwhelming majority of B2B invoice value, and the network cross-checks returns as they land. When quoted, shipped and billed disagree inside your business, it has stopped being an internal problem.
Per-seat price is the number in the proposal. Implementation, integration and training are the number you actually pay. A three-year total that includes migration is the only comparison worth running.
Best-of-breed made sense when each tool was clearly better than any suite. The tie-breaker now is the handover: every seam between two systems is a place where the order line, the complaint or the follow-up goes missing.
Good — those calls are where the next post comes from. Bring your record and we'll argue about it for twenty minutes.
