“We’re not just looking for an employee, we’re looking for a partner.”
Yeah. We know.
HI. SOMETHING IN YOUR BUSINESS IS ANNOYING YOU.
We’d like to have a look at it.
KELAK
Practical fixes for businesses that have better things to do.
Tell us about one real problem. We look at it properly and send back a written report. Free, and you keep it either way.
Get a KELAK First LookNo payment on this page.
Where things got to
THE AGE OF AI
Artificial intelligence is not new. It has been in development for decades. Something changed at the end of 2022. ChatGPT arrived and AI stopped being a thing happening inside research labs. Everybody could just use it. Then it moved very fast.
Tap through them. It is the same system in the picture each time, just further along.
That’s our rough shorthand for the shape of it, not a precise industry history. It’s useful for exactly one thing, which is working out where you’re standing.
Because for your business, the AGI question doesn’t matter yet. There’s already an enormous amount you can do with what exists today.
So. That’s where the technology is.
Where are you?
OKAY. FORGET ALL THAT FOR A SECOND.
Let’s talk normally.
Are you using AI? For yourself? Probably. For the business? Maybe.
Somebody in the office has ChatGPT open in another tab. Your marketing person generates a few captions. Somebody asks it to rewrite an email before sending it.
Somebody with six fingers standing in front of a shophouse that was melting slightly.
We saw it.
Three bullet points that started with the same word, and none of them said anything.
Also we know.
Yeah, you can bin these too.
That’s not a criticism. Everybody did that. It was free, it was fast, and it filled a gap on a Thursday afternoon.
But that’s the shallow end.
AI can write you another caption. Cool.
What about the actual business?
Worth saying out loudEverybody started on the free tier. That is not the embarrassing part. The embarrassing part is stopping there and calling it an AI strategy.
Here’s the part people get wrong
THE PROBLEM ISN’T USUALLY WHERE PEOPLE ARE POINTING.
This is most of what we do. Somebody tells us the thing that’s wrong, and the thing that’s wrong is real, and it is also two steps downstream of something nobody has looked at.
You might be right. Most people are at least half right about their own business.
Half right is where the money goes.
Get a KELAK First Look
The part worth paying attention to
THE INTERESTING AI IS THE AI YOU DON’T SEE.
The useful stuff doesn’t sit in a chat window waiting for somebody to type into it. It sits quietly behind the work.
None of it is a chatbot.
Look at what actually changed in those cases. Somebody made a decision about where each piece of work should sit. Which parts stay human. Which parts get help. Which parts run on their own. Which parts nobody touches, because when those go wrong they go wrong expensively.
That decision is the entire job.
Get it right and the tools barely matter. Get it wrong and you’ve bought a very expensive way of doing the same work twice.
The tellIf the only way anyone can point at your AI is by opening a chat window, it is not doing very much yet.
Nobody says
LOOK AT OUR AI!
They say
huh, that used to take us three hours.
Important
AND NO. WE ARE NOT TRYING TO AUTOMATE YOUR WHOLE COMPANY.
Every piece of work in your business sits in one of these. Most of the value is in putting each one in the right place, which is unglamorous and almost nobody does it.
Your turn. Pick a job, then put it where you think it belongs.
The goal is more AI. The goal is a better business, run by people who are more capable than they were last year.
Tuesday problems
SO WHAT DOES KELAK ACTUALLY HELP WITH?
Pick the ones that sound like your week. They come with you to the form.
Here’s the offer
LET US LOOK AT YOUR BUSINESS.
LET US LOOK AT YOUR BUSINESS.
FREE.
Yes. Actually free.
Fill in one form and tell us: who you are, what the business does, and what’s annoying you. What takes too long. What keeps getting forgotten. What your team keeps redoing. Where customers get stuck. What depends far too much on one person.
- NOyou don’t need to give us your customer database.
- NOyou don’t need to send us confidential documents.
- NOyou don’t need to reveal your secret sauce.
- NOyou don’t need to install anything.
Describe one real problem in plain words. That’s genuinely enough for us to be useful.
We look at it properly and send you back a KELAK First Look Report.
Get a KELAK First LookNo brochure. Nothing that reads like this:
“Your organisation should leverage cutting-edge AI solutions to unlock transformative efficiencies across the value chain.”
Please kill us if we ever send you that.
KELAK First Look
NO CHARGE
Fair question
WAIT. WHAT’S THE CATCH?
Short versionYou get the report, we get to find out what businesses here actually need. Nobody sends you an invoice for that part.
There isn’t much of one, but there is a reason this exists.
We’re building KELAK and we’re early. Right now, real conversations with real Malaysian businesses are worth more to us than money is. We learn what businesses here actually need. You get another pair of eyes on a problem for free. That’s the trade, and it’s a good one for both of us.
And yes, obviously, we’re hoping some of it turns into work.
There is no hidden version. We look at your problem, we tell you what we found, and if there’s something worth doing and we’re the right people to do it, we’ll say so and tell you what it would involve. If you want us to, that’s where the paid part starts.
If what we find is a small fix, the report says it’s a small fix. We’re not going to discover a forty-thousand-ringgit programme inside a problem that needed a form and a rule about who replies first.
If we find nothing worth selling you, we’d rather tell you than dress something up. You’d work it out by week three anyway, and then we’d have wasted both of our years.
Take the report either way. Try the idea yourself. Give it to your IT guy. Give it to another vendor. Ignore us forever. No strings on it, no twelve-email funnel, no salesman calling you every Thursday until one of you dies.
And because we’re at the beginning, our first paid engagements are scoped accordingly. We are not going to walk into your SME pretending to be Accenture and hand you a six-figure invoice.
The first piece of paid work is deliberately small. Small enough that you get to look at what we actually did and decide from evidence, rather than from a sales page, whether we’re worth more than that.
Read this bit properly
THIS ISN’T FOR EVERYONE
If you want somebody to say yes to AI no matter what.
Sometimes the honest answer is that you’ve got a process problem, or a hiring problem, or a spreadsheet four people are editing at the same time. We’ll say so, and you’ll have paid nothing to find out.
If what you actually want is headcount reduction with a technology excuse stapled to it.
That’s not the work we do. Not a moral lecture, just not our job.
If a wrong output in your business has legal, medical or safety consequences.
Put it on the form. Some of that work shouldn’t be automated at all, and we’d rather say that out loud than sell you something.
Marketers first. Technologists third.
WHO ARE WE?
Two people in Malaysia. We came up through marketing and business development, not through engineering, and that changes which questions we ask first.
- 01The customer and the commercial problem. Who is this for, what do they actually want, what’s getting in the way, and what would materially change the business if it were fixed.
- 02The way the work gets done today. The real process. Including the bits nobody wrote down and the person everybody quietly depends on.
- 03Then, and only then, the technology. Sometimes that’s AI. Often it’s a better process, a form, or an integration you’re already paying for that nobody switched on.
AI is third on that list on purpose. It’s genuinely powerful, and it is still a tool. The expensive mistakes usually start with somebody buying the technology first and then going looking for a problem to put it on.
So we spend our time finding out where these tools break, because that is the part nobody puts in the demo. A tool that looks extraordinary in a launch video can still fall over the first time it meets a customer who phrases the question the wrong way, and knowing which ones do that is most of what you are paying anybody for.
We’re not going to pretend we’ve been doing this as KELAK for twenty years. We haven’t. We’re starting.
Which is exactly why we’re willing to prove it before asking you for much.
What that means in practice
✓You see the thinking before you pay for anything.
✓The report is written for you, not filled with words we borrowed from a vendor deck.
✓If the answer is that you don’t need us, that’s what the report says.
✓First paid work is small on purpose, so you judge us on evidence.
The name
WHY KELAK?
If your Malay is rusty.
kelak
adverb
Later. Afterwards. The time to come.
That’s the part that interests us. Not AI for the sake of AI.
What becomes possible next. For your business. For your people. For the way the work actually gets done.
We can see some of it already.
We’d like you to see it too.
Last thing
SO. WHAT’S ANNOYING YOU?
Not “what solution do you need.” We don’t know yet. Neither do you. That’s fine. That’s the whole reason to let somebody look.
Start with the real thing.
BRING US THE PROBLEM.
Right. We’ve got it.
Your First Look request is with us. One of us reads these ourselves, so there is a person looking at your problem rather than a routing rule.
- NextWe read it properly and come back to you within a working day, even if it’s only to ask you one question.
- ThenYou get the First Look Report. If the honest answer is that you don’t need us, it will say so.
Nothing to pay. Nothing to install. Nothing to cancel.
You can close this tab and get on with your day.
What happens to this
We keep what you write about the problem, because that is the thing we are going to look at. Your name and contact are only so we know where to send the report back. We do not sell it, we do not share it, and you are not being added to any mailing list. Once we have sent your report, we delete it.
Reading it back no internet involved
waiting for a bit more to go on
That is a pattern matcher having a guess. It only knows the words you just typed and it has never seen your business. The real one is one of us reading this properly and going to look.