The idea for BRiN began in March 2014, after Dale Beaumont met a business owner who had driven 11 hours just to attend one of his workshops. When Dale asked why he had travelled so far, the answer was simple: he needed help and had nobody to talk to.
That conversation stayed with Dale. He began researching the scale of the problem and discovered that hundreds of millions of small and medium-sized business owners around the world had little or no access to a trusted business advisor. Traditional coaching, workshops and live events could only reach so many people, so Dale started asking a much bigger question: what if technology could make high-quality business advice available to anyone, anywhere, at any time?
That question sent Dale to learn more about Artificial Intelligence (AI). In 2015, he attended leading AI and deep learning events, including the Deep Learning Summit in London, and began learning everything he could about how AI might be used to deliver personalised business education and support at scale. As a non-technical founder, Dale then assembled a development team across three continents and began building what would become BRiN, the world’s first AI-powered business advisor.
Even the name had a story. Dale realised people would find it easier to connect with a person than a faceless software product, so he wanted something short, human and memorable. Inspired by names such as Siri, Alexa and Watson, he decided the name should start with “B” for business, searched for four-letter names beginning with B, and BRiN was born.
BRiN officially launched in 2016 at the RISE Conference in Hong Kong. At the time, the concept was genuinely cutting edge: users could type or speak a business question and BRiN would use natural language processing to match it with the most appropriate answer. By 2017, it had been programmed to answer more than 5,000 commonly asked business questions across areas such as marketing, sales, leadership, finance, productivity and people management.
For its time, BRiN was remarkable. It attracted thousands of users, generated extensive media coverage and was featured by outlets including Forbes, The Huffington Post, Business Insider, Gizmodo, The Next Web, GQ and Sky Business. It also received multiple Stevie Awards for innovation and business education, and Dale later spoke publicly about how the team built, launched and grew one of the earliest AI-powered business advisory platforms.
But building something early also means discovering the limitations before everyone else does. By 2019, it had become clear that the underlying technology could not yet deliver the level of personalisation Dale had originally imagined. BRiN could answer thousands of pre-programmed questions extremely well, but if someone asked something in an unexpected way, wanted deeper follow-up or needed advice tailored specifically to their business, the experience broke down.
Much of BRiN’s intelligence depended on carefully mapped and pre-written answers. That made the product highly impressive for the time, but it also made it difficult to evolve into the truly conversational and personalised advisor Dale had envisioned. Rather than keep forcing the technology beyond what it could realistically do, Dale made the decision to sunset BRiN and refocus his energy on Business Blueprint, while continuing to believe that the broader vision would eventually become possible.
In the years that followed, artificial intelligence advanced at an extraordinary pace. Today, tools such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini can do many of the things Dale imagined back in 2014: understand natural conversation, respond to follow-up questions, work with context and provide personalised support in seconds. In many ways, the original BRiN vision has now become reality.
BRiN remains an important chapter in Dale’s journey because it showed what was possible long before the technology became mainstream. It won awards, attracted global media attention, helped thousands of business owners and gave Dale firsthand experience building one of the earliest AI-powered business education products in the world.
Most importantly, BRiN proved the idea that first struck Dale back in 2014: one day, every business owner really could have a business advisor in their pocket.
