In 2023 we were hired to find out whether anyone here was ready to talk to a machine.
This was a year before every company in the Gulf had an AI budget. The product was strong and the category was not yet a category, which makes for a particular kind of outbound: the meeting has to create the demand it then qualifies.
Our first call for the account produced a booked meeting, which our rep reported with some disbelief. That is usually a sign of pent-up curiosity rather than pent-up demand, and telling those two apart became the whole job.
What we did
Nine months across the UAE, into hospitality, retail and healthcare. 32 meetings booked, 24 confirmed held, 32 companies introduced.
Hotels and hospitality groups: Bulgari Hotels, St. Regis, Sofitel, Jannah, Centara, Bab Al Shams, Ghaya Grand, Grand Excelsior, Carlton. Retail and consumer: Landmark Group, Level Shoes, Liwa Trading, Rasasi Perfumes, Al Hajis Perfumes, Vijay Sales, Redington Gulf, Al Ghurair. IT directors, regional heads of technology and, in several family businesses, the executive director himself.
Halfway through the engagement the conversation moved from voice assistants to language models. The prospect list did not change; the framing did. A perfume group's executive director took a meeting titled, in plain words, optimising a process using a language model. In 2023 that was an unusual sentence to put in a calendar invite.
The question nobody asks in the deck and everybody asks in the room
Four meetings in, the pattern was unmistakable. Buyers were not asking about accuracy or languages. They were asking where the company was, who would support them, and what happens when something breaks at two in the afternoon in Dubai.
So we changed the answer rather than the pitch. Every rep on the account was told to say, plainly and truthfully, that there is a local partner in the UAE with whom the company has worked on projects for years, and to bring that partner into the conversation at the point where implementation became real.
It is not a clever tactic. It is the only honest answer to a fair question, and the vendors who cannot give it lose deals they never learn about. A buyer here is not evaluating your technology in isolation. He is evaluating what happens after the purchase order, and geography is the first thing he checks.
What it shows
For a category the market has not named yet, curiosity will fill your calendar and will not fill your pipeline. Separate the two early by asking who would run it and who would support it. And if your client is foreign, get a credible local answer to the support question before the first meeting, not after the fifth.