After 25 years in the channel, Michael Chanter has launched 1KE, a presales autopilot designed to eliminate the solutioning bottleneck that slows down complex sales cycles. The platform aims to convert up to 40 percent more pipeline by reducing manual solutioning work by 90 percent, allowing partners to scale without hiring additional senior technical talent.
In technical sales, revenue opportunities frequently stall due to a shortage of experienced presales talent. Chanter explained that translating customer problems across multiple vendors, technologies, and delivery models into credible proposals requires difficult, manual work. When teams cannot respond to enough opportunities, senior technical staff get pulled into repetitive tasks.
"These people are incredibly valuable, but they are often the bottleneck in complex sales cycles," Chanter said. Poor proposal quality and slow response times cause deals to lose momentum, leaving good pipeline unconverted.
Solving the expertise bottleneck
Chanter spent more than a year and wrote over one million lines of code to build the platform. The objective was not to create another AI text-generation tool, but to develop a system capable of reasoning across multiple technical and commercial constraints. This allows technical sales teams to produce tailored, credible solutions for real-world presales environments.
"I realised that AI could be like having 1000 engineers in every sale process: that is what led to 1KE," he said. The platform is designed to reflect a partner's specific capabilities, vendor relationships, and commercial models rather than generating generic, canned solutions.
Lessons from the build
Chanter identified three primary lessons from developing the business. First, embedding AI across the organization allows a significantly smaller team to manage software development, go-to-market strategy, and sales operations. Second, enterprise-quality AI requires solving deep technical problems around reliability, orchestration, and auditability, rather than wrapping a simple chatbot around an existing model.
Third, while AI accelerates initial development, making the final 20 percent reliable inside actual business workflows remains difficult. Sales leaders adapting to these workflow shifts can explore how presales roles are evolving alongside these tools through the AI Learning Path for Technical Sales Representatives.
Why this matters for sales professionals
Sales professionals managing complex, multi-vendor deals can use presales autopilots to reduce the time spent waiting on technical proposals. This directly impacts margin and EBITDA by allowing teams to respond faster to existing pipeline opportunities without adding headcount.
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