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  • AI Won’t Hurt Your BD Career. Using It the Wrong Way Will.

    By Ipalibo Da-Wariboko — Aligned to Act | May 2026

    I want to start with something honest.

    I use AI every day in my work. I built a product powered by it. I believe it is genuinely useful for business development professionals — not as a novelty, not as a shortcut, but as a tool that, used well, makes the actual work of relationship-driven BD significantly better.

    I am also watching a version of AI adoption in BD that I think is quietly doing damage. Not to the people using it — to the relationships they are trying to build.

    The distinction between these two things is not subtle once you see it. But it is almost never discussed clearly. So let me try.

    The version that helps

    When I talk to BD professionals who use AI well, a pattern emerges. They use it upstream. Before the conversation, not during it or instead of it.

    They use AI to compress and structure their preparation — to pull together what they know about an account, identify the gaps, map the stakeholders they haven’t fully accounted for, and surface the questions they should be asking but haven’t thought of yet. They use it to pressure-test their read on a deal: am I seeing this situation clearly, or am I too close to it to be objective?

    The output of all this work is not a script. It is not a set of talking points. It is clarity. The professional walks into the meeting — or onto the call — having done more cognitive work in advance than they could have managed alone. And because that work happened before the conversation, they are free to be fully present in it.

    Their clients cannot tell they used AI. They can only tell that this person is unusually well-prepared.

    That is AI used correctly in business development. And it is genuinely powerful.

    The version that hurts

    The version that hurts looks efficient but isn’t.

    It is the AI-drafted email that goes out with your name on it — technically personalized, structurally sound, unmistakably not you. It is the proposal that was generated from a template and reads like it. It is the follow-up message that references things correctly but carries none of the texture of the relationship you’ve been building. The right words, in the wrong voice.

    The people receiving these communications often can’t articulate why they feel off. But they feel it. Something in the message sounds like it was written for forty people, not for them. The warmth is there, technically. The specificity is missing.

    In relationship-driven BD — in agencies, in consulting, in any business that runs on long-term trust between people — this matters more than the efficiency savings justify. The reason your best clients keep coming back is not because your proposals are well-structured. It is because they trust you specifically. Your judgment. Your voice. The way you see their situation.

    The moment your communication starts to sound like everyone else’s, you are eroding the thing that makes you worth knowing.

    Why this distinction is hard to make in practice

    The pressure to use AI for communication is real and understandable.

    BD professionals are under enormous time pressure. The pipeline is always full. Every account wants more attention than the hours allow. AI writing tools promise to solve this — and for some communication, in some contexts, they deliver. If you are drafting a standard acknowledgment, a meeting logistics email, or an internal summary, AI can do that competently and it costs you nothing meaningful.

    The problem is that the efficiency logic doesn’t stop there. It creeps into the communications that actually matter. The strategic update to the client who is on the fence. The follow-up after a hard conversation. The message that needs to carry the full weight of a three-year relationship in two paragraphs.

    These are the messages where your voice is the product. Where the person on the other end is, consciously or not, evaluating whether you understand them, whether you were paying attention, whether this relationship is what they thought it was. No AI tool can carry that weight. It can produce the shape of the message. It cannot produce the thing that makes the message work.

    The test I use

    When I am deciding whether AI belongs in a particular part of my work, I ask one question: is this upstream of the conversation, or is it the conversation?

    Upstream — research, preparation, synthesis, diagnostic thinking, structural analysis — AI can do genuinely useful work here. The output enriches the conversation without replacing it. My clients and contacts see the result: a professional who is unusually prepared, who asks better questions, who has clearly thought about their situation. They do not see the process.

    If the AI output is itself what goes to the client — the email, the message, the proposal, the response — I look hard at whether my voice is actually in it. Not the general shape of professional communication, but me, specifically, writing to this person, about this situation, at this point in our relationship. If I read it back and it could have been sent by anyone to anyone, I rewrite it.

    This is not a rule against AI in communication. It is a standard for what communication in relationship-driven BD actually requires.

    What this means for your practice

    If you are a BD professional thinking about how to use AI well, the answer is not to avoid it. The answer is to be intentional about where it goes.

    Use it to do more and better preparation than you could manage on your own. Use it to see your deals and accounts more clearly. Use it to identify what you don’t know before you need to know it. Use it to compress the time that the ninety percent takes — because the ninety percent is real work, and AI can genuinely help you do it faster without reducing its quality.

    Keep your voice in every communication that carries the weight of the relationship. Not because AI can’t produce competent text — it can — but because competent text is not what your relationships are built on. They are built on the specific, irreplaceable quality of your judgment and your presence.

    The BD professionals who will build the strongest practices in the next decade are not the ones who use AI least. They are the ones who use it most deliberately — who understand exactly what it can do that is genuinely useful, and what it cannot do that is genuinely theirs.

    Why I built A2A with this in mind

    This distinction is not an afterthought in how A2A was designed. It is the organizing principle.

    A2A handles the preparation. The research, the diagnostic thinking, the stakeholder analysis, the contextual brief before a high-stakes meeting. The work that happens before you walk in the room — the ninety percent that determines whether the ten percent goes well.

    A2A does not write your emails. It does not generate your proposals. It does not produce communication that goes to your clients with your name on it. That boundary is intentional and it will not move.

    Because the goal was never to make you more efficient. It was to make you more present — to give you back the cognitive space that preparation consumes, so that when you are in the conversation that matters, you are fully in it.

    That is what good AI use in business development looks like. And it is, genuinely, worth the investment.

    See how A2A approaches preparation →

    Ipalibo Da-Wariboko is the founder of Aligned to Act — a preparation platform for professionals who win business through relationships.

    © 2026 Aligned to Act LLC. All rights reserved.

  • The 90/10 Rule: Why the Best Business Development Professionals Win Before They Walk In the Room

    By Ipalibo Da-Wariboko — Aligned to Act | May 2026

    There is a version of a meeting that most BD professionals have experienced but almost nobody talks about.

    You walk in — or you join the call — and from the first sixty seconds, something is different. You are not searching for the right question to ask. You already know what matters to the person across from you, what they tried before it didn’t work, and what a good outcome looks like for them specifically. You are not managing the conversation. You are in it.

    That feeling is not charisma. It is not a gift some people have and others don’t. It is the result of preparation done before you got there — preparation thorough enough that when the moment arrives, you are not thinking about what to say. You are just present.

    This is the 90/10 rule. And it is the single clearest dividing line between the BD professionals who consistently close complex deals and the ones who work just as hard and wonder why the results are inconsistent.

    What the 90/10 rule actually says

    The rule is simple. Ninety percent of what determines whether a complex deal closes happens before you walk into the room. Ten percent happens in the room.

    That doesn’t mean the ten percent doesn’t matter. It matters enormously. The relationship, the conversation, the moment when the person across from you finally says what they’ve been circling around — that is irreplaceable. No amount of preparation can substitute for genuine human connection.

    But preparation is what makes the ten percent possible.

    When you walk into a meeting having done the ninety percent — having mapped the stakeholders, understood the organizational dynamics, thought through the likely objections before they surface, built your point of view on what this person actually needs — you are free. You are not spending cognitive bandwidth on what to ask next. You are not half-listening while you mentally rehearse your next point. You are there, fully, for the conversation that matters.

    The professionals who do the ninety percent don’t just close more deals. They have better conversations, build stronger relationships, and create the kind of trust that produces referrals, renewals, and the phone call out of nowhere that turns into the next opportunity.

    What the ninety percent actually is

    Preparation is an overused word. Most people use it to mean “I read their LinkedIn profile and skimmed their website.” That is not preparation. That is the minimum viable effort not to embarrass yourself.

    Real preparation for a complex deal or a high-stakes meeting has five components. Each one builds on the last.

    The stakeholder map. Who is actually involved in this decision? Not just your contact — the full picture. Who are the functional stakeholders whose domains are affected? Who is the authority holder with formal sign-off power? Who are the informal influencers your contact is managing internally? You do not need names for all of them. You need to know the shape of the room you are not in.

    The organizational context. What is going on inside this organization right now? What are they trying to accomplish this quarter? What pressure are they under? What did they try before that didn’t work? Context is not background information — it is the lens through which everything your contact says in the meeting becomes legible.

    The concern map. What are the most likely objections, hesitations, or deal-killers — and who do they belong to? The finance objection is different from the legal objection is different from the senior leader who hasn’t been briefed. Each one has a different shape and requires a different response. Knowing them in advance means you are not surprised when they surface. You have already thought through your answer.

    The one question. Every high-stakes meeting has one question that, if asked well, opens the conversation up in a way nothing else can. It is usually not the question you planned to lead with. It is the question that comes from genuinely understanding what this person is trying to accomplish and what they have not yet said out loud. Finding that question before you walk in is the deepest form of preparation there is.

    The clear ask. What is the one outcome you need from this conversation? Not the ideal outcome, the outcome you need. The next step that keeps the deal moving. Preparation without a clear ask produces good conversations that go nowhere. The ask is the point.

    Why most people skip it

    The honest reason most BD professionals don’t do thorough preparation is not laziness. It is time.

    The preparation described above takes real work. For a major account or a high-stakes meeting, it might take an hour. For a deal in progress, it might take thirty minutes to pull together what you already know and add what you’ve learned since the last conversation. That is time that has to come from somewhere — and in a world where the pipeline is always full and the day is always shorter than it should be, preparation gets compressed into the five minutes before the call starts.

    The second reason is that most people don’t have a structure for it. Preparation without a framework is exhausting and inconsistent. You never know when you’ve done enough, so you either over-prepare and still feel uncertain, or you under-prepare and hope the conversation takes care of itself.

    The third reason — the one nobody says out loud — is that thorough preparation forces you to confront what you don’t know. The stakeholder you haven’t identified. The concern you can’t answer. The organizational dynamic you don’t understand. That discomfort is real. And it is also exactly the information you need.

    What changes when you do it right

    When the ninety percent is done, the ten percent — the meeting, the call, the conversation — feels different.

    Not easier, exactly. Complex deals are complex. The conversation still requires judgment, flexibility, and genuine listening. But the quality of what you bring to it is different. You are not reacting. You are navigating.

    The questions you ask land differently. Because they come from actual understanding, not from a script, they signal to the person across from you that you have done the work. That signal builds trust faster than almost anything else in business development. People can feel the difference between a professional who prepared for them specifically and one who prepared a standard pitch.

    The objections you encounter don’t derail you. Because you anticipated them, you have already thought through your response. You can engage with the concern genuinely instead of scrambling.

    And when something unexpected happens — when the conversation goes somewhere you didn’t plan — you have the context and confidence to follow it. Preparation doesn’t make you rigid. It makes you free.

    A word on AI and preparation

    I want to address something directly, because it is increasingly relevant to how BD professionals think about this problem.

    AI tools can be genuinely useful in the preparation process. They can help you synthesize information, structure your thinking, and surface patterns across what you know about an account. Used well, they compress the time that preparation takes without reducing its quality.

    But there is a version of AI use that does the opposite — that produces a generic briefing, a templated summary, or a set of talking points that could have been written for any account. That is not preparation. That is the appearance of preparation. And it produces all the wrong results: the meeting where you sound informed but aren’t present, the question that lands flat because it came from a template rather than genuine understanding, the relationship that never quite develops because the person across from you can feel that something is off.

    The goal of preparation is not to be well-informed. It is to be present. The information is in service of that — and only valuable when it gets you there.

    The ninety percent is yours to do. AI can help you do it faster. It cannot do it for you.

    Where to start

    If you are in an active deal or have a high-stakes meeting coming up, start with one question: do I know the full shape of the room I’m not in?

    Not just your contact — the stakeholders beyond them. The concerns that live outside the conversation you’ve been having. The person whose hesitation you haven’t prepared for because you didn’t know to look.

    If the answer is no, that is where the preparation begins.

    The deal doesn’t close in the room. It closes in the preparation that happened before it.

    A2A was built for this — a preparation platform for relationship-driven BD professionals. If you have a deal in progress or a high-stakes meeting coming up, see how it works.

    Ipalibo Da-Wariboko is the founder of Aligned to Act — a preparation platform for professionals who win business through relationships.

    © 2026 Aligned to Act LLC. All rights reserved.

  • The Deal Looked Done. Then Someone You’d Never Met Killed It.

    By Ipalibo Da-Wariboko — Aligned to Act | May 2026

    You know the moment.

    The relationship is real. The timing is right. The person across the table — or across the Zoom — is engaged, responsive, and genuinely aligned with what you’re offering. You’ve done everything that good relationship-driven professionals do: listened carefully, built trust slowly, and earned the right to have a serious conversation.

    Then something shifts. The responses get slower. The timeline moves. A meeting gets rescheduled, then rescheduled again. And then one day the thread goes quiet in a way that feels different from before — and you know, without anyone saying it directly, that the deal is gone.

    No dispute. No competing offer. No moment where anything visibly broke.

    Just silence. And a relationship you invested months building that didn’t produce what it should have.

    If you work in complex, relationship-driven business development — if your deals involve multiple stakeholders, long timelines, and decisions that happen inside organizations you can’t fully see — you have lived this. More than once.

    Here’s what actually happened.

    The person you were building the relationship with wasn’t the person who decided.

    This is the uncomfortable truth at the center of most stalled deals in relationship-driven work. And it’s not a simple failure of research or diligence. It’s structural — built into how organizations of any real complexity actually make decisions.

    The person you were talking to was real. Their interest was real. Their ability to advance the conversation was real.

    But their authority to close it was not.

    Somewhere above them, beside them, or behind them, there was a person — or a group of people — whose perspective on the deal was the one that ultimately mattered. They may have been a committee that met once a month. A senior leader who hadn’t been briefed. A legal or finance function whose concerns were never surfaced in your conversations. A board member, a procurement team, a partner, a regulator — someone whose sign-off was structurally required but whose name never came up until the deal was already in trouble.

    That person never sat in your meetings. Never asked you a direct question. Never gave you a chance to address their concerns. They formed a view — about the risk, the fit, the timing, the value — from documents, summaries, and second-hand accounts. And then they made a decision you never had the opportunity to influence.

    This is the gatekeeper problem. It is not unique to any one industry. It is the defining structural challenge of relationship-driven business development at any real scale — in healthcare, in professional services, in commercial real estate, in enterprise technology, in economic development, in any environment where decisions are made by organizations rather than individuals.

    Why it keeps happening — and why the conventional advice doesn’t fix it

    The conventional wisdom in relationship-driven BD is sound as far as it goes: build trust, demonstrate value, stay top of mind, follow up consistently. That advice has closed thousands of deals and built real careers.

    But it was designed for a world where the person you built the relationship with was also the person who made the decision. In smaller organizations and simpler transactions, that world still exists.

    In complex deals — the ones worth winning — it largely doesn’t.

    Today, the person who feels the problem most acutely is often several layers below the person with the authority to solve it. The decision-makers with formal sign-off power are operating on a completely different set of concerns than your primary contact. They are not evaluating the relationship you built. They are evaluating whether saying yes creates a problem for them — a risk exposure, a budget commitment, a precedent, an internal political complication.

    No amount of rapport with your contact protects you from that evaluation. The only thing that protects you is knowing it is happening — and preparing for it — before the deal reaches the stage where those people become involved.

    By the time a deal goes quiet, the invisible decision-maker has usually already formed their view. And they formed it without you in the room.

    The map most BD professionals are missing

    Every complex deal has at least three layers of stakeholders. Most relationship-driven professionals are working one of them.

    The first layer is your contact — the person who feels the problem, drives the internal conversation, and manages the relationship with you. This is where trust is built and deals are advanced. It is not where deals are closed.

    The second layer is the functional stakeholder — the people whose domain is affected by the decision. Legal, finance, compliance, operations, clinical, technical — depending on your industry, the names change, but the dynamic is the same. These people have specific concerns that almost never surface in your conversations with your primary contact, either because your contact doesn’t know what those concerns are, or because they don’t think to raise them until something goes wrong.

    The third layer is the authority holder — the person, committee, or entity whose formal approval is required to move forward. In large organizations, this person is often never mentioned by name until the deal is already in the approval process. In institutional environments, this is often a committee that operates on its own timeline entirely. In partnership-driven work, this is often a decision-maker at a parent organization, a capital partner, or a governing body that your contact has limited influence over.

    Your deal lives or dies in layers two and three. Most relationship-driven BD professionals — even experienced, excellent ones — are spending the majority of their time and energy in layer one.

    That’s not a failure. It’s a gap in the map. And the map is the first step toward changing the outcome.

    Three questions that surface what your contact won’t tell you

    You can start building a better map before a deal gets complicated. These three questions, asked early in a relationship, will surface more about the real decision structure than any amount of follow-up later.

    “Walk me through what happens internally once we have an agreement in principle.” Most contacts have never been asked this directly. When they answer, they will often tell you — sometimes in more detail than they intended — exactly how the internal process works, who is involved, and where things tend to slow down. The answer is your map. The hesitation in the answer is your first signal.

    “Who else needs to be comfortable with this before you can move forward?” The word “comfortable” matters here. “Who needs to sign off” produces a procedural answer — a name or a title. “Who needs to be comfortable” invites your contact to tell you about the people they are managing internally, not just the people in the formal chain. Those are often very different people, and the second category is where deals quietly die.

    “Is there anyone in this process who tends to ask hard questions — and what usually concerns them?” This is the question that gives you the invisible gatekeeper. Not always — sometimes your contact doesn’t know, or isn’t positioned to say. But when they answer it honestly, you have just learned more about how to protect this deal than almost anything else you could have asked.

    These three questions take less time than most follow-up emails. They are most effective in early conversations, before the deal has momentum and before your contact has become protective of the internal process.

    What preparation looks like when you know the full map

    Knowing the decision structure is only valuable if you do something with it.

    Once you understand who the invisible stakeholders are and what they care about, you can prepare for them — even if you never meet them. The materials your contact carries into those rooms, the framing of the proposal, the language used to describe risk and value — all of it can be built to address the specific concerns of the people who will evaluate it without you present.

    The legal team’s risk concerns. The finance function’s budget framing. The senior leader who sees this as a strategic question, not an operational one. The board member who needs a one-paragraph rationale, not a thirty-page deck.

    You are not in the room. But your preparation is. And preparation, built specifically enough for the actual decision-makers, is the closest thing to presence you have.

    The professionals who consistently close complex deals — across industries, across deal types, across relationship contexts — share one quality more than any other. It is not the size of their network or the warmth of their relationships. It is clarity about who is actually making the decision, what that person needs to feel confident, and how to prepare for a conversation they may never directly have.

    That clarity starts before the deal gets complicated. It starts with the right questions, in the right conversations, before the silence has a chance to set in.

    The pattern, stated plainly

    Relationship-driven business development has always been about more than the relationship in front of you. The best practitioners have always known this intuitively — they ask better questions, map their accounts more carefully, prepare more thoroughly for conversations they don’t fully control.

    What has changed is the complexity of the environments they are navigating. Organizations have more layers. Decisions require more sign-offs. The gap between the person who feels the problem and the person who authorizes the solution has widened in almost every industry.

    The relationship you build with your contact still matters. It matters enormously. But it is no longer sufficient on its own. The preparation you do for the people you’ve never met — the stakeholders in layers two and three who will decide the outcome of work you’ve invested months building — is what separates the deals that close from the ones that go quiet.

    A final thought

    When a deal dies quietly, it almost never means the relationship failed. Your contact usually wanted what you were building together. They just didn’t have the full picture of what it would take to get it approved — or they did, and didn’t know how to help you navigate it.

    The work of a great relationship-driven professional increasingly happens in two places at once: in the relationship with the person in front of you, and in the preparation for the people you’ll never meet.

    Most tools built for BD professionals focus on the first place. Managing contacts, tracking touchpoints, logging calls. That work matters. But it doesn’t prepare you for the room you’re not in.

    At Aligned to Act, we built A2A for the second place — a preparation platform that helps relationship-driven professionals understand the full stakeholder landscape of a complex deal, build the context they need before every critical conversation, and walk into every room — and every room they can’t enter — genuinely ready.

    If you’re in a deal right now that has gone quieter than it should, it’s worth asking a different question. Not what went wrong with the relationship. But who you never had the chance to prepare for.

    Start with A2A →

    Ipalibo Da-Wariboko is the founder of Aligned to Act — a preparation platform built for professionals who win business through relationships. A2A helps relationship-driven professionals understand the full stakeholder landscape of complex deals, prepare for every critical conversation, and build the business relationships that move decisions forward.

    © 2026 Aligned to Act LLC. All rights reserved.