On a Tuesday morning a customer messages a distributor about a $240 set of tools. The assistant answers in seconds: 21,480,000 LBP. At noon the owner reads the thread and cannot say which rate produced that figure, whose rate it was, or until when it holds. The arithmetic is fine. The price is not yet a price, because nobody decided what it means.
On one message that gap costs almost nothing. At ten times the volume, with nobody reading the footnote, it costs real money. This post is about the five things I want written down before an AI states any price to a customer in Lebanon or elsewhere in the region. I call the written version the Price Stamp.
What a quoted price is actually deciding
In a single-currency market a price is a number. In a multi-currency market it is a small package of decisions. Which currency is the price denominated in? Which rate converts it? When does it expire? Who pays if the rate moves before the customer does? How is the result rounded, and how is change given?
A human clerk answers all five without noticing. She knows it is Tuesday, that the owner adjusted the rate last week, that regulars get rounded to the nearest 5,000, and that this customer pays in dollars and wants pounds back as change. None of that is written anywhere. It lives in her head, which is why quotes from a good clerk rarely end in an argument.
An AI assistant carries only what was written down. Usually that is a price list and one line in its instructions, pasted in once, weeks ago: convert to LBP at 89,500. It will apply that line faithfully in every conversation, with no sense of what day it is. The assistant is not making a mistake. It is filling the gaps with the only information it was given.
The region makes this sharper. Most firms I talk to already live with more than one rate: dollars in cash, Lebanese pounds at a market rate, and in Lebanon a bank-dollar figure that is a different thing again. Elsewhere in MENA the gap is between official and parallel rates. I am not saying any particular rate is moving today. A quiet rate is exactly when people hardcode it into a prompt, a price sheet or a template, and then forget it is there. The risk is not volatility. It is a number with no owner.
The Price Stamp: five lines every AI-stated price must carry
The stamp is a short block that sits behind every quote. You write it, in plain language the assistant can follow and a customer can read. Five lines:
- Currency. The one currency the price is denominated in, and the settlement currencies you will accept. "USD list price, LBP and USD accepted" is a complete line.
- Rate and source. Which rate converts it, named: your own market rate, a platform rate, a bank rate. Plus who updates it and how often. "The current rate" with no owner is not a line.
- Valid until. A date and time, or a number of hours. After that the quote is re-issued, not honoured by default.
- Drift owner. Who absorbs the move between quote and payment: you, the customer, or a split above a threshold. It is stated in the quote, not discovered at collection.
- Rounding and settlement. The rounding unit for LBP amounts, what change you give and in which currency, and what happens when a customer pays part in one currency and part in the other.
Nothing on that list is technical. Each line is a commercial decision someone in your business already makes informally. The stamp makes it once, in writing.
Two details matter. Line two needs a named person, because a rate with no owner goes stale quietly. And line four belongs to the owner, not to whoever wrote the assistant's instructions, because it is a margin decision.
A worked example: a composite with illustrative numbers
This is a composite, with illustrative numbers, not a client case. It reflects situations I see, and the figures are invented to show the mechanism.
Take a tools and electrical supplier. A unit-set lists at $240. Weeks ago someone wrote an illustrative rate of 89,500 LBP per dollar into the assistant's price notes. Today the owner would settle in pounds at an illustrative 90,900, about 1.5 percent higher.
- Quote as stated: 240 x 89,500 = 21,480,000 LBP.
- Quote at the owner's rate: 240 x 90,900 = 21,816,000 LBP.
- Gap per quote: 336,000 LBP, which is about $3.70 at 90,900 (336,000 / 90,900 = 3.696).
$3.70 is nothing. Now scale it. Say 120 quotes a month at an average of $240, so $28,800 quoted. If 60 percent settle in LBP, that is 28,800 x 0.60 = $17,280. At a gap of 1.5 percent, the leak is $259.20 a month, and 259.20 x 12 = $3,110.40 a year. (The exact gap is closer to 1.54 percent, which would give slightly more; I am keeping 1.5 for clean figures.) Nobody decided to give that away. It leaked because no line said whose rate to use.
Rounding is the same story. A $237.40 item at 90,900 gives 237.40 x 90,900 = 21,579,660 LBP. A clerk would say "call it 21,580,000." An assistant might send the full figure, round to the nearest million, or round differently each time. The stamp says nearest 5,000 LBP, so the figure is 21,580,000, the customer sees a clean number, and the rule is written down rather than improvised.
Here is the same quote with the stamp attached:
- Currency: USD list, LBP accepted.
- Rate: owner-set market rate, 90,900, updated by the finance lead each morning.
- Valid until: 18:00 today.
- Drift: we hold the rate until expiry; after expiry the customer pays at the rate on the day of payment.
- Rounding: nearest 5,000 LBP, change given in LBP.
The assistant did not make an error in either version. It answered with the only information it had. What was missing was a decision, not intelligence.
Where this travels in MENA
The same five lines apply across the region. Only the sources change. In Egypt a business may need to say whether its reference is an official or a parallel rate. Iraq and Syria have posed the same question at various points. Gulf traders invoicing across pegged and floating currencies still need the valid-until and drift lines, even where a rate barely moves, because a customer paying in a third currency brings the question straight back. The stamp stays the same; line two simply names a different source.
For the other direction of the same problem, I wrote about the invoice a Lebanese company receives from an AI vendor in AI Pricing Was Never Built for Beirut. This post is about the quote your own assistant sends out.
Putting the stamp in place this week
- Write the stamp once. One page, plain language. The owner and the finance lead agree every line before anyone touches the assistant's instructions.
- Name one person for the rate line. Their job is a single update, at a set time, in a single place.
- Test it on ten real past quotes. For each one, ask which line it would have failed. Count the failures by line. The pattern shows where your business has been relying on memory.
If you want the one-page template, write to me through the contact details on this site. And if you run the ten quotes, I would like to hear which line failed most.
A price is a decision, not a number. Make the decision before the assistant speaks.
