What was said
What this says
Current to 13 Oct 26New CIO Simon Achterberg is consolidating platforms and moving fleet, contract and billing data; Gemma Thorne argued the brain covers calls, emails and tickets that platform will not. Renewal on 2 Dec 2026 is open.
What happened: Simon Achterberg, the Chief Information Officer, joined the account for the first time. He joined in May and reviews every platform the business pays for.
Customer view: Fleet, contract and billing data are moving to a new platform. Gemma Thorne argued that calls, emails and service desk tickets are not on it and the brain handles them.
Commercial: Simon noted forty licensed against a few active and asked about flexibility on user numbers. Sophie Ling will send order form terms and renewal options in one pack, with no price promise.
Watch: Simon's sequence is facts, then an options paper, then any decision. Term ends 1 Dec 2026 and renewal falls on 2 Dec 2026.
Themes
Current to 9 Oct 26Who was there
BB-Demo
Them
Follow-up
Next steps
Current to 9 Oct 26- Amara Obi to send Simon the architecture diagram and the service terms from the order form this week.
- Amara and Kofi Asamoah to write the one-page list of sources, indexed content and users, with the usage trend.
- Sophie Ling to send the order form terms and renewal options in one pack, and Gemma to arrange Simon's conversation with the service desk.
Risks
Current to 9 Oct 26- The new CIO's one-platform brief could make the brain a duplicate or drop it as a layer.
- Simon sees forty licensed against just under ten active as a sign of over-buying, which pressures the renewal.
- If the leasing system changes during the programme, a source could stop loading and records indexed would go flat.
Opportunities
Current to 9 Oct 26- Option two, the brain staying as the calls, emails and tickets layer reading from the new platform, fits a point Simon had not weighted.
- A small training session for remarketing within the existing licence is agreed, widening use.
- A one-page list of what the brain holds can put the gap in front of Simon in his options paper.
Transcript
- Amara Obi NoneHello, can everyone hear me alright? Gemma, Kofi, I can see you both. I think Simon's still joining.
- Kofi Asamoah NoneHi Amara, yes, loud and clear. I've got the ticket list open, as I always do, and there's nothing on it. No open tickets at all, which is a nice way to start.
- Gemma Thorne NoneAfternoon, all. Sorry, I'm still walking in from the car park, give me a second, the wifi in this corridor is hopeless.
- Amara Obi NoneNo rush at all. Sophie's on as well, she's just listening in today.
- Sophie Ling NoneHi everyone. Yes, just here in the background, carry on.
- Simon Achterberg NoneGood afternoon, and apologies, the meeting before this one overran. Amara, we haven't met, so before anything else: do you have an architecture diagram of how the brain sits on our side? Even a rough one will do.
- Amara Obi NoneOf course, and nice to meet you properly, Simon. I'm Amara, I'm the customer success manager. I took over this account fairly recently, so I'll be straight with you: I'm still learning the history, and Gemma and Kofi know it far better than I do. I do have a one-page diagram. It runs inside your own Snowflake account, so your data doesn't leave it, and I'll put it in the chat after the call, if that's alright.
- Simon Achterberg NoneThat's helpful. Yes, please send it. Who looks after the Snowflake side, on your end?
- Kofi Asamoah NoneThat's me, mostly. I've been the admin since go-live, so I wire each source in and I check the nightly load every morning.
- Simon Achterberg NoneGood. Thank you, Kofi.
- Gemma Thorne NoneRight, I'm in, I'm at my desk. Sorry. Hello Simon, hello everyone. Amara, do you want to start with the numbers? I'd like Simon to see what the team's actually been doing with it.
- Amara Obi NoneYes, that's exactly where I wanted to begin. Here's what the numbers say. You're on Growth, so forty licensed users. On average we're seeing just under ten of those active in a normal month, and that's up by about a third on the previous quarter. So it's moving the right way, even if it's well below the licence.
- Gemma Thorne NoneThat's about right. It's the account managers mostly, and a couple of people on the service desk. The licence was always going to be bigger than where we are today, we sized it for the whole of client services.
- Amara Obi NoneRight, which I'd like to talk about, who else should have access? But let me finish the housekeeping first. No high priority tickets, no tickets at all in the last month, which Kofi's just confirmed. Invoices are all paid on time, nothing overdue. The contract sits at forty-one thousand eight hundred a year, the order form and the invoices agree, and you came on in December last year, so you're coming up to the end of the first term.
- Simon Achterberg NoneYes. The end of the term is partly why I asked for this call. The contract ends on 1 Dec 2026, I believe, and the renewal falls on 2 Dec 2026.
- Amara Obi NoneThat's what we have, yes. The term ends on 1 Dec 2026 and the renewal date is 2 Dec 2026.
- Simon Achterberg NoneGood. Then let me be open about where I'm coming from, so nobody's surprised later. I joined in May with a brief to simplify our systems and our data platforms. I review every platform the business pays for. One platform, not five. That's the brief, and it isn't aimed at any one tool.
- Amara Obi NoneThat's fair, and I appreciate you saying it up front.
- Simon Achterberg NoneSo, the programme. We are moving fleet data, contract data and billing data onto the new platform, and the aim is to have all three there by October. Not a pilot, the real data, the single version. Once those three are there, the question becomes what else belongs on it, and what we stop paying for.
- Kofi Asamoah NoneSorry, Simon, can I ask: which source is that from, for fleet? Is it the leasing system, straight from the source, or the extract that the finance team already produce?
- Simon Achterberg NoneThe leasing system, directly. The extracts are one of the things we want to get rid of.
- Kofi Asamoah NoneOkay. That would actually help me. At the moment a fair amount of my time goes on making the client list match the leasing system, because the extracts drift. If it's direct, that's less of a mapping problem.
- Simon Achterberg NoneThat is the idea. Where does this sit in our target architecture, though, is the question I keep asking about everything. I'd like to understand where the brain sits relative to the new platform. Is it a layer on top, a parallel store, a duplicate?
- Amara Obi NoneHonestly, it depends on how you set up the platform, and I don't want to guess. What I can say is that the brain is built and run in your Snowflake account, so it's your data, in your environment. It reads from the sources and builds the layer that people ask questions of. If your new platform becomes the source for fleet, contract and billing, the brain could read from there instead of from the old systems. That's a connector question, and Kofi would know more than me about how that looks.
- Kofi Asamoah NoneYes, it's a mapping question, not a bug. If the fields land with the same meaning, I'd repoint the source. If they don't, I'd have to redo some mapping, and I'd want to tell Gemma before I touched anything, because the account managers' reviews are built on those definitions.
- Simon Achterberg NoneUnderstood. And who supports it at two in the morning? If something fails in the overnight load, who gets woken up?
- Amara Obi NoneOn Growth the nightly refresh should complete by seven in the morning, your time, on business days, and there's a support route with a first response commitment for priority issues. I won't quote you the detail off the top of my head, I'd rather send you the actual service terms from the order form so you've got them in writing.
- Simon Achterberg NoneYes, please. In writing. I don't take a roadmap as a commitment, and I won't make a platform decision without an options paper, so I'll need the facts for that paper.
- Amara Obi NoneCompletely reasonable. I'll get those over to you this week.
- Gemma Thorne NoneCan I jump in here, Simon? Because I think there's something that matters, and I'd rather say it now than after the options paper's been written.
- Simon Achterberg NonePlease. That's why you're on the call.
- Gemma Thorne NoneFleet, contract and billing data, fine, that's the spine, and I'm all for it being in one place. But client services doesn't live on that. We live on calls, on emails, and on the driver service desk tickets, per client. That's what an account manager reads before a client review. What did the client actually see? Which fleet, which driver, which complaint, what did we say back? None of that is in the leasing system, and none of it will be on the new platform. It isn't structured fleet data, it's the conversation.
- Simon Achterberg NoneMm. So the platform would hold the numbers, but not the story around them.
- Gemma Thorne NoneExactly that. And the point of the brain, for us, was never just the numbers. Before a review, an account manager used to spend most of a day rebuilding the picture of one client by hand: invoices from here, tickets from there, the last call from somebody's notes. Now they ask a question and it comes back with all of it together.
- Simon Achterberg NoneI'll be candid, I hadn't weighted that as a requirement. In the programme documents it's described as fleet, contract and billing, and I treated the rest as secondary. Can you say how much of client services runs on those three sources, the unstructured ones?
- Gemma Thorne NoneMost of it, honestly. I wouldn't want to put a percentage on it, because I haven't measured it, and I don't want to give you a number I can't stand behind. But ask any account manager what they open first on the morning of a review and it isn't the leasing system.
- Simon Achterberg NoneThat's a fair way of putting it, and I'd rather have that than a made-up figure. Kofi, what's your view? Technically, could the new platform hold those sources?
- Kofi Asamoah NoneI'd be guessing if I said yes or no, and I don't like guessing. It's not a matter of whether data can be stored. It's what happens after: the matching of a call or an email to the right client, and the right fleet. Someone has to do that matching and keep it right every night. Right now that's what the brain does for us. If the new platform is meant to do it, somebody needs to own it.
- Simon Achterberg NoneWhich is a fair point, and it goes to the heart of the options paper. Option one, the new platform takes it. Option two, the brain stays for that layer and reads from the platform. Option three, we lose it. I suspect option three is what Gemma would object to.
- Gemma Thorne NoneYes. Very much. I'd like to keep the corporate fleets we already have, and a client review that starts from the numbers everybody has agreed on is a lot of why we keep them.
- Amara Obi NoneCan I offer something practical? I don't want to push anything onto you, Simon, because it's clearly your call. But it might help the options paper if we sit down, Kofi and I, and write down plainly what the brain holds today and where it gets it from. A one-page list: the sources, what's indexed, who uses it. Then you can put that next to what the platform will hold, and the gap is visible rather than argued about.
- Simon Achterberg NoneThat would be useful. Genuinely. A list I can read in five minutes.
- Kofi Asamoah NoneI can do that. I'll check last night's load as well, so the list reflects what's actually flowing, not just what's configured.
- Amara Obi NoneBrilliant. And I'll add the usage trend on top, so you can see who's asking questions and how that's changed. Because the people who use it are the people you'd be taking it away from, if it came to that.
- Gemma Thorne NoneLet's get the service desk in on this as well. They're the ones whose tickets feed it, and Simon should hear from them what it looks like on a bad day, rather than from me.
- Simon Achterberg NoneGood idea. I'd welcome that. I'd like to talk to someone on the desk before I write anything. Can you arrange it, Gemma?
- Gemma Thorne NoneYes, I'll set it up. Probably someone senior on the desk and an account manager, two voices rather than a crowd.
- Simon Achterberg NonePerfect.
- Sophie Ling NoneCan I come in briefly? Simon, just on the contract, so it's on the record. Nobody here is going to press you for a renewal decision today. There's a December date, and what Amara has said is that she'd rather you had the facts. If it helps, I can send you the order form terms alongside the service terms, so everything's in one place.
- Simon Achterberg NoneThank you, Sophie, that's appreciated. Yes, one pack, please. And I'd be interested in what flexibility there is on the user numbers. Forty licensed against a few active suggests we may have bought more than we're using.
- Sophie Ling NoneUnderstood. I'll set out what the terms allow and what the options are at renewal, in plain words. I won't promise anything on price on this call, that wouldn't be right, but I'll make sure you see the choices.
- Gemma Thorne NoneAnd I should say, from my side, I can't take a commercial decision on my own. If it gets to that, it's a conversation upstairs, and I'd want to have it after Simon's paper, not before.
- Simon Achterberg NoneThat's sensible. The sequence is: facts, then the paper, then any decision. I'd rather not rush it and get it wrong.
- Amara Obi NoneAgreed. Can I ask one more thing, because I think it's the bit I'd be failing at if I didn't? The usage is only just under ten active of forty. If this continues, I'd like to make that number bigger, not just defend it. Gemma, who else should have access?
- Gemma Thorne NoneThe remarketing team, I think, and a few more of the account managers who haven't been trained yet. At the moment it's the early adopters. Which is fine, but it means the review packs still vary depending on who's preparing them.
- Amara Obi NoneThen let's do a short training session for the next group. It's a useful thing whichever way the platform decision goes, because the habit of asking the question is the same.
- Simon Achterberg NoneI'd be cautious about adding a lot of new users before I know the answer. It's not that I'm against it, I just don't want to train people on a tool that may change.
- Gemma Thorne NoneFair. Though if we wait until the paper's done, we'll have lost the autumn. Could we start small? Just the remarketing team, say.
- Simon Achterberg NoneA small group, yes, I could live with that. No new commitments, though. Within the licence we already have.
- Amara Obi NoneAbsolutely, it's all within the forty you've already got. No cost, no change to the contract.
- Kofi Asamoah NoneOne thing for the list, Simon. I should tell you the risk from my side as well. If the leasing system's structure changes during your programme, a source can stop loading, and I'd see it in the records indexed going flat. So please tell me before you change anything on that side, even small changes. I'd rather hear it from you than find it in the morning.
- Simon Achterberg NoneThat's a reasonable request. I'll make sure the programme team includes you in the change notices for fleet, contract and billing. Can you give me a name for the distribution list, or shall I just use your address?
- Kofi Asamoah NoneUse mine, that's fine. Cheers.
- Amara Obi NoneCan I just recap, then, so we all leave with the same list? First, I send Simon the architecture diagram and the service terms from the order form, this week.
- Simon Achterberg NoneYes.
- Amara Obi NoneSecond, Kofi and I write the one-page list of what the brain holds, where from, and who uses it, with last night's load checked, and the usage trend on top. Third, Gemma sets up a conversation between Simon and the service desk. Fourth, Sophie sends the order form terms and the renewal options in one pack. And fifth, a small training session for the remarketing team, within the existing licence, which Simon's happy with as long as nothing new is committed.
- Sophie Ling NoneThat's all of it, as far as I can tell.
- Gemma Thorne NoneOne more from me. When Simon writes the paper, can I read the part that covers client services before it goes up? Not to change the conclusion, just to check it describes what we actually do.
- Simon Achterberg NoneYes, I'd welcome that. You'll see that section before anyone else does. I'd rather have it right than quick.
- Gemma Thorne NoneThanks, Simon. That's all I wanted.
- Amara Obi NoneAnd let's get the next review in the diary, so we're not relying on a chance call. How about a short one in the autumn, once the three data sets are on the new platform? That way we can look at the list and the platform side by side with real data.
- Simon Achterberg NoneYes. After October, I think, when the programme has actually delivered. Not before, or we'll be talking about plans rather than results.
- Amara Obi NonePerfect. I'll send a placeholder invitation and we can move it.
- Kofi Asamoah NoneSounds sensible to me.
- Simon Achterberg NoneBefore we finish: thank you, all of you. I came into this call expecting to ask for a diagram and get a sales conversation. It was rather more useful than that.
- Amara Obi NoneThat's very kind. I'd rather you made the right decision with the right facts than the wrong one with us in the room.
- Gemma Thorne NoneAnd to be fair, Simon, I think the point about calls and emails and tickets is going to matter whichever platform it ends up on. It's something we'd have to solve anyway.
- Simon Achterberg NoneI think you may be right. Which is rather the thing I hadn't appreciated. Right, I must go, I've another meeting in a few minutes.
- Amara Obi NoneOf course. Thanks, everybody. Speak soon.
- Sophie Ling NoneThanks all. I'll have the pack with you in a few days.
- Kofi Asamoah NoneCheers all, I'll start on the list this afternoon.
- Gemma Thorne NoneThanks, everyone. Speak soon.
- Simon Achterberg NoneThank you. Goodbye.