overview / 01-1KE / 02-understanding-the-deal
Stage 1 · Understanding the Deal
Last updated at 2026-06-15 18:09 AEST.
Before 1KE can recommend anything, it has to understand the opportunity. This first stage is the platform's reading and comprehension step: it takes the documents attached to a deal and turns them into one organised, trustworthy picture of what the customer needs. Everything later in the process is built on top of this picture.
The simplest way to think about it
Imagine handing a sharp new analyst every document for a deal and saying: "Read all of this, and give me a clean brief — what the customer wants, what their setup looks like, what the constraints are, and where each fact came from." That's exactly what this stage does, for one document at a time, and it keeps updating the brief as new documents arrive.
What goes in
Any document that helps describe the deal. The platform recognises and reads a wide range of material:
- Customer requests and statements of work (RFPs, SOWs)
- Meeting and call transcripts
- Email threads and notes
- Spreadsheets — bills of materials, quotes, sizing
- Environment and compliance documents
- PDFs, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and images
It reads modern documents directly. For trickier formats — scanned PDFs, slide decks, spreadsheets — it extracts the text first, then reads that. Either way, you just upload the file and the platform handles the rest.
What it pulls out
From each document, the platform extracts two kinds of things:
The concrete things the customer needs — each captured with its category, how important it is, and what "done" looks like. The platform deliberately ignores filler: standard legal and contract boilerplate is not treated as a requirement, so the list stays focused on what actually has to be delivered.
The softer context that colours the deal — vendors and technologies mentioned, the customer's current environment, budget and commercial hints, compliance needs, business objectives, and who the stakeholders are.
How it builds one trustworthy picture
A deal usually has many documents, and they don't always agree. An old transcript might say one thing; a fresh RFP might say another. Rather than treat every document as equally reliable, 1KE weighs each source and lets the more credible one win — and when two sources are close, it keeps both and notes the disagreement instead of silently picking one.
Three things decide how much a document is trusted: what kind of document it is, how confidently the platform was able to read it, and how recent it is (a document's influence gently fades over about four months). The document type carries the most weight:
The result is a single, coherent brief for the deal — not a pile of contradictory notes — that gets a little richer and more accurate with every document you add.
Built-in safeguards
If a document carries little real signal, the platform flags it for review. If something is clearly off-topic, it's skipped rather than allowed to muddy the picture.
A document too large to read in one pass is split into sections, read in parallel, and carefully recombined — with a final pass to remove duplicates and reconcile the pieces — so size is never a reason to miss something.
Each update creates a new version of the deal's picture, with a record of exactly which document produced it. You can always see the history and trace any fact to its origin.
If you re-process an identical document, the platform recognises it and reuses the earlier reading instead of paying to read it again.
What comes out
A clean, structured, versioned understanding of the deal: the requirements, the context, and the provenance of every fact. It isn't a document you send to anyone — it's the foundation the next three stages stand on. A better-understood deal produces a better strategy, a better design, and a better proposal.
Next stage: Shaping the strategy · Back to 1KE