Confidentiality is held by the architecture, not by instructions.
Two separate spaces, two identities, and a check on every fact before it changes side. An instruction given to the model is not a boundary; an architecture is.
TRADING · DISTRIBUTION · AI AGENTS
Your operations.
Agents that act.
For traders, importers and distributors: agents that read your enquiries, check your stock and prepare your replies.
Your suppliers stay invisible to your customers, and the reverse. Nothing leaves without you.
Thomas Cottin · Independent consultantSales background · Engineering training
01 / IN PRACTICE
An email arrives.
The rest gets prepared.
Availability, reply, follow-up: see how an agent can move an enquiry forward, up to your approval.
ILLUSTRATIVE SCENARIO · FICTIONAL DATA
01 / THE ENQUIRY
One enquiry, several checks.
Camille · Maison RiveSubject: LX-240 availability
CUSTOMERHello,
do you have 20 units of reference LX-240 available for delivery on Thursday?
Thanks, Camille
The agent picks out the reference, the quantity and the deadline to check.
THE OPERATIONS THREAD
Each party receives the information its role needs.
02 / CASE STUDY
A textile importer.
An agent that prepares every reply.
An engagement under way since September 2026: automating a trading company’s sales loop without ever exposing its suppliers to its customers, or its customers to its suppliers.
The client is an intermediary: its supplier relationships and its customer list are the whole business. Its mailboxes have mixed the two for years, and only the discipline of its people has kept them apart. An agent wired straight into the mailbox would have been the first thing to break what holds the house together.
So the system separates, as mail arrives, what belongs to customers from what belongs to suppliers, in two spaces that cannot see each other. The customer-side agent answers with the company’s stock, prices and technical sheets, in the owner’s voice, from its data and never from guesswork. The supplier-side agent knows nothing but a job number.
Before anything leaves, every draft is checked: a fact that does not belong to its recipient is blocked and flagged, never silently rewritten. Adversarial tests, in French and English, bar any release that would let a leak through. Nothing is sent until a person has read it and pressed send.
First phase in service, draft-only. Every draft is reviewed and measured against three years of history; the quality measures decide the move to the next phase.
- SECTOR
- Textile import and distribution, France
- ENGAGEMENT
- 40 days over 5 months, in phases with exit criteria
- SCOPE
- Incoming enquiries, stock, prices, technical sheets, stock held at the mill, dispatch
- REFERENCE
- 3 years of mail archive, over 20,000 threads
- ISOLATION
- 2 separate spaces, 2 identities, 62 leak tests
- AUTOMATIC SENDS
- None
03 / PRINCIPLES
What the agent
never sees.
Four build rules, held on every engagement. They decide what an agent may read, compute and write, and what stays with people.
Facts from code, prose from the model.
Prices, stock quantities, lead times and tariff codes come from the company’s data, never from the model’s estimate. The model writes, and judges tone and intent. It invents no figure.
Lists for safety, judgement for helpfulness.
Whether a piece of information may change side is never left to the model’s reading of a message: a reading that gets it wrong is a confident leak. The model’s judgement goes where a mistake is cheap: priority, intent, wording.
Draft first, with an explicit error budget.
Nothing leaves without a person. A draft’s quality misses, a tone, an omission, a wrong link, are measured against an explicit tolerance and corrected before sending. Confidentiality has no tolerance: zero, by construction.
04 / METHOD
Start from your operations.
Transform the systems.
A first useful scope, proven on the ground, then a gradual move into service.
Reconnaissance
Follow your operations, your tools and the exceptions that shape the day. Choose what deserves automating.
YOU LEAVE WITH
A map of the flows and the priorities.
Architecture
Define the agents’ role, their access and the decisions that stay yours. Plan for the edge cases.
YOU LEAVE WITH
A defined scenario, its rules and its approvals.
Integration
Connect the right solutions to your tools. Test on your real situations and adjust.
YOU LEAVE WITH
A working pilot, tested on an agreed scope.
Handover
Train the team, document the rules and set up the monitoring. Give you the means to adjust and take back control.
YOU LEAVE WITH
A trained team and a documented operation.
TO BEGINA diagnostic.
A diagnostic.
Two to three days.
On site or remotely, I follow your incoming enquiries, your tools and the day’s exceptions. You leave with a first automation scope, costed and ready to launch. The diagnostic’s length and fee are fixed before it starts.
Ask for a diagnostic05 / ABOUT
An engineer’s rigour.
A salesperson’s eye.
Thomas Cottin
Former sales director
Engineering degree, Imperial College London
I approach systems with the realities of the floor in mind: a promise made to a customer, a supplier lead time to confirm, a team that needs the right information.
With Teassea Digital I design and build these automations myself, from scoping to handover. You have one contact, who knows the commercial promise as well as the code that keeps it.
Your contact, from scoping to handover.Meudon, France · LinkedIn
06 / CONTACT
Which operation
takes too much of your time?
Describe the task, the tools you use and what slows you down. The first conversation scopes a diagnostic.
Describe my need by emailOne email to start the conversation.
DIRECTLY WITH THOMAS
thomas.cottin@outlook.com