In 2022 we were hired to sell the ingredient a year before the market started cooking.
This engagement ran through 2022 and into 2023, which in the history of artificial intelligence is the year before everything. Our reps were explaining why a model needs labelled data to retailers and marketplaces who, for the most part, did not yet have a model.
Some markets are not slow. They are early. The distinction matters, because the tactics that fix a slow market make an early one worse: more calls into an audience with no project produce more polite conversations and no pipeline.
What we did
Eleven months across the UAE, in retail, e-commerce, mobility and technology services. 21 meetings booked with 20 companies.
IKEA, Sharaf DG, Dubizzle, ekar, Lenskart, 6thStreet, Max Fashion, Apparel Group, BFL, Eros Group, elGrocer, FNP, Momos and the Roads and Transport Authority, plus regional AI consultancies including ADDO AI.
What an early market actually looks like
The signature of an early market is a good meeting that leads nowhere, repeatedly. The prospect is interested, asks intelligent questions, is glad you called, and has no budget line because the project that would consume the product does not exist yet.
An outbound team can read that pattern in about six weeks if it is looking for it. The tell is the second meeting: in a real market the buyer brings a colleague, and in an early one he brings enthusiasm. Counting second meetings rather than first ones is the cheapest early-market detector we know, and we now build it into the reporting on every new category we take on.
The postscript belongs to the client rather than to us. The company is now part of Nebius and works with some of the largest names in artificial intelligence, and the demand it was looking for here arrived a couple of years later. Being early is not the same as being wrong. It is expensive in a way that being wrong is not, because everything you learn stays valid.
What it shows
Distinguish an early market from a slow one, quickly, and say which one you are in. The measurement that tells you is the second meeting. When a category has not arrived, the honest recommendation is to spend less and wait, and an agency that cannot say that is charging a client to be patient.