It started in Saudi Arabia, talking with a few hundred salespeople.
At the end of 2024 I was in Saudi Arabia, consulting on conversational AI: speech-to-text and telling speakers apart in Arabic dialects. I expected to be the one bringing new technology. Instead I met sales teams that were ahead of most I knew in Europe: well funded, quick to try new tools, and serious about process.
Over the next months I spoke with hundreds of account managers, sales development reps and business developers. Their days looked alike: hours of meetings on Zoom, Teams and Google Meet, then more time writing summaries by hand and copying them into the CRM. And many of them asked for the same thing. They wanted something on the call with them that would point out what they were missing and where to take the conversation next.
That wish stayed with me because of my own first sales call. At AIESEC my job was to find Estonian companies willing to take foreign IT interns. I called an IT company in Tallinn and, before pitching anything, asked what their business was about. I was simply curious. They invited me in to hear more, and an intern from Mexico ended up joining them.
The consulting work showed me the other half of the problem. The big speech models were excellent in English and in formal Arabic, but much weaker in the dialects people actually speak on calls.
Back home in early 2025 I found the same gap, and it surprised me. Gong, the biggest name in the category, had built an impressive product, but had done little for smaller European languages or Arabic dialects. Attention and the newer tools like it did a good job of filling in the CRM after the call. Very few helped the person while the call was still happening.
So I built what those reps asked for. During the call, Teneks reminds the rep of the question they have not asked yet. When the call ends, it writes the summary and the next steps and files them in the CRM. All of it in the language the call was held in.
Before Teneks I spent twelve years in engineering, from applied research at Fraunhofer IIS to AI in production at Ubisoft and Sennder. The longer version is on LinkedIn and arneniitsoo.com.
We are based in Tallinn. I still make cold calls myself, and every week I talk with our customers about what they need from a tool like Teneks. Most of what we ship starts in those conversations.
