The six characters
Two questions, six readers: how fluent you are with AI, and whether your instinct is to reach for the tool or for the customer.
The book’s Introduction sorts its readers with two questions. How comfortable are you with AI? That runs left to right. And when a problem lands, do you reach for the tool or reach for the customer? That runs top to bottom. Six characters fall out.
Along the bottom row, customer first, sit the Curious, who know something is changing and have not yet found their way in; the Translator, who can move between the customer’s problem and the machine’s capability in both directions, and who is the sweet spot; and the Orchestrator, who runs a team of people and tools and knows which is which. Along the top row, with a health warning, sit the Tinkerer, the Tool-Chaser and the Builder, all fluent, all at risk of producing something impressive that no customer asked for. The whole book is one move along the bottom row: Curious to Translator to Orchestrator. If you recognise yourself in the top row, the move is down first, then along.
Set out in full in: Creating Customer Value Propositions with AI (Kogan Page, 2027), Introduction.
Related terms
AI fluency
Comfort with the tools, held alongside knowledge of the customer. Hold only the second and you are slow; hold only the first and you are fast, fluent and confidently wrong.
The three registers
Productive, creative, collaborative: three different jobs AI can do for an account team. Not a maturity ladder, and the collaborative one needs an expert in the loop.
The KAM Skills Tri-Stack
Strategist, Business Developer, Operator: three skill domains, four sub-skills each, mapped to the three stages of the cycle. Almost nobody is trained for all three.
See the method run on one real account in three days: the One Page Proposition.