"We're not just looking for an employee, we're looking for a partner."
Yeah. We know.
HI.WE WANT TO MAKE YOUR LIFE EASIER.
That's it. That's the pitch.
Throw them away. Seriously, drag one.
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 is our rough shorthand for the shape of it, not a precise industry history. It is useful for exactly one thing, which is working out where you are standing.
Because for your business, the AGI question doesn't matter yet. There is 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?
The part worth paying attention to
THE INTERESTING AI IS THE AI YOU DON'T SEE.
The useful stuff does not sit in a chat window waiting for somebody to type into it. It sits quietly behind the work.
None of that is a chatbot.
Look at what actually changed in those examples. 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 at all, 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 have bought a very expensive way of doing the same work twice.
When it works properly, the technology disappears. The benefit doesn't.
Nobody says
LOOK AT OUR AI!
They say
huh, that used to take us three hours.
Let's be honest about it
SO WHY ISN'T YOUR BUSINESS DOING MORE OF THIS?
You run the business. We'll worry about the machines.
Here's the offer
LET US LOOK AT YOUR BUSINESS.
FREE.Yes. Actually free.
Fill in one form and tell us: who you are, what the business does, what's annoying you, what takes too long, what keeps getting forgotten, what your team keeps redoing, where customers get stuck, where your staff get stuck, and what depends far too much on one person.
- NOYou do not need to give us your customer database.
- NOYou do not need to send us confidential documents.
- NOYou do not need to reveal your secret sauce.
- NOYou do not need to install anything.
Give us enough to understand one real problem in plain words. That's enough for us to be useful. We'll look at it properly, and we'll send you back a KELAK First Look Report.
Bring us the problemNo 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
Then it's yours. Take the report and try the idea yourself. Give it to your IT guy. Give it to another vendor. Ignore us forever. No strings on it.
Fair question
WAIT. WHAT'S THE CATCH?
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. It's a good one for both of us, and it's the main reason we can afford to do this at all.
If we look at your situation and think there's something worth building, we'll tell you what we'd do about it. If you think that's worth paying for, we can talk.
If not, keep the report. No hard feelings. 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.
Tuesday problems
SO WHAT DOES KELAK ACTUALLY HELP WITH?
Pick the ones that sound like your week. They come with you to the form.
Important
AND NO. WE ARE NOT TRYING TO AUTOMATE YOUR WHOLE COMPANY.
Sometimes the answer is one of these.
The goal is more AI.
The goal is a better business, run by people who are more capable
than they were last year.
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 should not 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 is 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 is AI. Often it is a better process, a form, or an integration that already exists and nobody switched on.
AI is third on that list on purpose. It is a genuinely powerful tool and it is the reason a lot of people are talking to us right now. It is still a tool. Most of the expensive mistakes we see start with somebody buying the technology first and going looking for a problem to put it on afterwards.
So yes, we spend an unreasonable amount of time working out what these tools actually do when you point them at real work and watch what breaks. We research, we build, we break things on purpose, we compare tools, and we work out what should be handed to a machine and what absolutely should not.
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 do not need us, that is 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 AI solution do you need." We don't know yet. Neither do you. That's fine, that's the point. Start with the real thing.