Meridian, the built-in AI assistant

Meridian is the AI assistant built into Promote:Global. The difference from a general chatbot is context: it knows your products, your corridors, your roadmap and the way in you chose, so its answers are about your situation — selling into a market, or setting up in one — rather than trade in general.

What it is good at

• Duties and paperwork — what a corridor is likely to cost at the border and which documents it needs, computed from your product, not a generic category.
• Market comparisons — a ranked shortlist for your product when you have not picked a destination, and a comparison of candidate locations on investment evidence when you are choosing where to set up.
• Your way in — whether to export or invest, and which of the eighteen entry methods fits, weighed with your own numbers. The choice stays yours.
• Next steps — what to do next on a project, and who in the network can help with a step.
• Proposals — a change to your profile, a step for your plan, a market for a list. Meridian proposes; each card says what accepting will do; nothing is saved until you accept it.
• Plain explanations — an unfamiliar certificate, an incoterm, a customs regime, answered in your context.

What it works from

Your company profile, products, markets, projects and Knowledge — which is why describing your company first matters. A thin profile gets generic answers; a real one gets specific ones. On top of that it looks things up as you ask: applied tariffs, rules of origin, trade agreements, a screening list, and the documents a corridor requires.

How it shows its evidence

Every answer carries a Using: line naming the kinds of source it read, and opens into a drawer — Why Meridian says this — that lists them. Each item is one of six kinds, and the label says which:

• Observed in Promote:Global — a record, a stage, a count the platform itself holds.
• Company reported — something a company said about itself. True that they said it, not that it is so.
• Institution reported — a mandate, a program, a published term from an agency or chamber.
• From your Knowledge — a document you uploaded or one shared with you.
• External source — a lookup: a tariff, a rule of origin, a sanctions list, a trade agreement.
• Meridian inference — its own reading of the above. Listed separately, because it is never a fact the platform holds.

A source that failed to load says so in the drawer rather than disappearing — an empty result and a lookup that did not run are different things, and Meridian does not present one as the other. There are no confidence percentages anywhere: the evidence is more use to you than a number nothing has calibrated. And every Meridian surface carries the same line: Meridian is AI. Verify before acting.

When it says no

Sometimes the answer is that Meridian cannot establish what you asked — the profile does not hold it, the lookup did not return it, or the question is one it must not decide for you. That refusal arrives as an ordinary answer, saying what it could not establish and why, so you know what to supply or whom to ask. It never fills the gap with a guess.

What it costs

• Opening a page never spends anything. Meridian's always-on panels — what needs attention, what changed since your last visit — are worked out from your data without a paid call.
• Anything that does spend an AI action shows its price on the button before you press it.
• An answer that never arrives is not charged.
• AI actions come with a usage allowance that depends on your plan. The product shows your live allowance; an allowance you have paid for is never reduced during that paid period.

Limits, stated plainly

• Meridian gives guidance, not legal, tax, or investment advice. For a decision with legal weight, the network has the professionals.
• Duty and cost figures are estimates to plan with, not quotes to bill against.
• It will tell you two countries share a trade agreement. Whether a particular shipment qualifies for preferential treatment depends on the product, its origin and the date — that answer comes from the destination customs authority, not from Meridian.
• It answers from what it has read. Where Promote:Global has not yet researched a jurisdiction's support organizations, the product says so rather than letting Meridian fill the space — a fact about our coverage, not about what exists there.