In 1981 I founded Programmes Ltd — the first telemarketing company in Europe, and the first outbound business-to-business service provider of its kind anywhere. We built it the unfashionable way: a room of capable people, a coach in the middle, and a discipline of doing the unglamorous work — the calls, the follow-ups, the records — consistently, every day.
That business grew into The Merchants Group, employing over a thousand people. In 1997 we sold it to Dimension Data. The technology of that era — computer-telephony, the early machinery of handling customers well at scale — was the ancestor of what AI now does better.
I also paid a high price for my education. Some years later I put millions of pounds into a manufacturing business — and set aside the principles everything else had been built on: consistency, disciplined execution, the client's interest first. The loss taught me what I had been teaching all along. Those principles are exactly what AI now holds a business to, every hour of the day, whether the culture likes it or not. Accountability is unavoidable.
Merchants Virtual is the same work in its present form. The form sensible business takes now is artificial intelligence, applied carefully, by someone who has been doing this kind of work for a working lifetime. The technology takes the shape of the hand that uses it.