Why Cross-Border Introductions Still Matter in an AI World
Finding the right person is now nearly free. Being introduced to them is worth more than it was, because the scarce thing was never the name.
I use AI across research, regulatory intelligence, opportunity assessment and most of how my businesses run day to day. This is not an argument for doing things the old way.
It has made something clearer, though. The cost of finding the right person has collapsed. The value of being introduced to them has gone up.
Those two are not in tension. The second follows from the first.
When a name was hard to find, an introduction was mostly a delivery mechanism for information. Now that any competent search returns the name, the title, the mutual connections and a summary of the last two years, the informational part of an introduction is worth close to nothing. What remains is the part that was always doing the work, and which was easy to mistake for the rest of it.
An introduction is a transfer of accountability. Someone introducing you lends you a portion of their standing with the other person, and they carry the cost if you waste it. That is why a good introduction opens a door a well-researched cold approach does not, even when the cold approach is better written. The recipient is not responding to the quality of the message. They are responding to somebody they trust having been willing to spend something on you.
This is more true across borders, not less. In the Gulf, in Switzerland, in most of the markets I work in, the question behind a first meeting is not what you do. It is who vouches for you, and what happens to them if you turn out to be a problem.
One example, without the specifics. A family office I had known for years held an allocation in a pre-IPO round that a great many people were trying to reach a place on the cap table itself, rather than a feeder wrapped around one. Making the introduction took a paragraph. What made it land was several years of not having wasted their time, and the fact that I had screened the other side before I wrote it and would have carried the consequences if I had got that wrong.
Both parties then ran their own diligence, which is the part usually left out when this kind of story is retold. The introduction bought a real conversation. It did not buy a decision, and it should not have.
The part that cannot be accelerated
My first business was Pocketlife, a concierge and lifestyle management company in Switzerland. Much of my network still traces back to it. What accumulated there was not contacts. It was a record of having been useful and of not having embarrassed anyone, which is a different asset and a slower one.
The uncomfortable implication is that this is not something you can begin when you need it. The introductions available to you in a given year are largely a function of what you did in the years before, and no tool changes that.
AI has made everything upstream of the introduction faster. It has not touched the introduction itself, and I do not expect it to.