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 have also paid for my education. Some years later I put roughly twenty million pounds into a manufacturing business that did not adapt to the change in front of it, and I lost it — learning, expensively, a lesson I had been teaching all along and momentarily forgot in my own affairs: past success protects no one. The discipline has to be constant.
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.