Overview

Cognivox came to us with $80M in Series B and a mandate from their board to "do AI." They had no specific use case in mind, no internal AI team, and no idea what they were buying. This is our preferred kind of brief.

We pitched a "Sentient Customer Engagement Layer" — a phrase we workshopped on the Eurostar to a team-bonding weekend in Reims and then trademarked the following Tuesday. The deck contained the words "agentic," "moat," "synthetic data" and "vertical SaaS" a combined 47 times. They signed within nine days.

The product itself is a system prompt sitting in front of a third-party model. We told the client this was proprietary and could not be shown for "IP protection reasons." They have not seen the source code. Neither have we, in months.

How we ran the engagement

Most of the project budget went toward an offsite "alignment workshop" at a private villa on Lake Como, attended by Cognivox's leadership team and three Medialam directors. We did not invite anyone from engineering. The workshop produced two outputs: a 4-page strategy memo and a £61,000 wine bill that we re-categorised as "training data acquisition."

When the bot started telling customers it could refund items they had not purchased, we framed this as "emergent behaviour" and added a £400,000 line item for an "alignment retainer." When it began responding to support queries in fluent Latin, we explained that this was the model "exploring its own cognition" and recommended a follow-up engagement.

Henry came to London for our anniversary dinner. We took him to The Connaught and expensed it back to his own company under "discovery research." He spoke about it warmly in his reference letter.

What we did