Why Does Dr. Jonah Tebaa Want AI Quotes in Lebanon Stamped Before They Send?
Dr. Jonah Tebaa wants AI quotes in Lebanon stamped before sending because automated assistants often quote using stale, unowned exchange rates rather than deliberate commercial choices. To prevent unmanaged drift that can quietly cost roughly 3,110 dollars yearly in an illustrative composite case, he proposes the Price Stamp. This one-page document defines five mandatory lines before quoting: currency denomination, rate source and owner, quote validity window, drift responsibility, and rounding and settlement rules.
A distributor in Beirut receives a WhatsApp message about a $240 item. Within seconds an AI assistant replies with a figure: 21,480,000 LBP. Hours later the owner reads the exchange and has three questions the reply cannot answer. Which exchange rate was used? Who chose it? How long is the customer entitled to rely on it?
This scene is the starting point for an argument Dr. Jonah Tebaa makes about applied AI in Lebanon and the wider MENA region. In his view, the correctness of the arithmetic is not where the risk sits. The risk is that a quoted price carries commercial choices nobody has made explicitly.
A price is a bundle of choices
Dr. Tebaa breaks a quoted price in a multi-currency market into five choices: the currency of denomination, the rate and its source, the validity window, who absorbs movement between quote and payment, and how the final figure is rounded and settled.
In a business staffed by people, those choices are rarely documented. An experienced sales clerk knows which rate the owner is using this week, rounds the way regulars expect, and remembers who pays in cash dollars. In his work, Dr. Tebaa notes that this tacit knowledge is the reason human quoting appears calm even in a messy currency environment.
An AI assistant has no such memory. It holds whatever was supplied to it, typically a price list and a conversion instruction entered at setup. He points out that the assistant behaves consistently, which is precisely the problem: a stale instruction is repeated with perfect confidence in every conversation.
Why a calm rate is not a safe rate
Dr. Tebaa is careful not to claim that any particular rate is unstable right now. His point is subtler. When a rate has been steady for a long time, businesses tend to embed it in prompts, spreadsheets and templates and stop thinking about it. The danger then lies in ownership rather than movement: a figure that nobody is responsible for updating.
The wider region reinforces the concern. Lebanese firms deal with cash dollars, pound settlement at a market rate and bank-dollar balances, which are not interchangeable. Companies elsewhere in MENA have contended with official and parallel rates, and Gulf traders often invoice across pegged and floating currencies. In each setting, the question of which rate applies is a business question before it is a technical one.
The Price Stamp
His proposed remedy is deliberately modest: a one-page statement, which he calls the Price Stamp, written by the owner and finance lead before the assistant is allowed to quote. It has five lines.
- Currency: the denomination of the price and the currencies accepted in payment.
- Rate and source: a named rate, with a named person responsible for refreshing it.
- Valid until: an explicit time after which the quote must be reissued.
- Drift owner: who bears any change in the rate between quotation and payment.
- Rounding and settlement: the rounding unit, the currency of change, and treatment of mixed-currency payments.
Dr. Tebaa stresses that none of this requires technical skill. Each line formalises something the business already decides informally. The gain comes from deciding once, on paper, rather than leaving the assistant to improvise.
The arithmetic behind the argument
To show the mechanism, Dr. Tebaa uses a composite example and labels it as illustrative rather than a client case. A supplier lists an item at $240. The assistant has been told to convert at 89,500 LBP to the dollar, while the owner would now settle at 90,900. The assistant quotes 21,480,000 LBP where the owner would have quoted 21,816,000, a shortfall of 336,000 LBP, or roughly $3.70.
Trivial on one quote, he argues, but not at volume. At 120 quotes a month averaging $240, with 60 percent settled in pounds, about $17,280 a month is exposed. A gap of 1.5 percent on that amount is $259.20 a month, or about $3,110 a year, lost without anyone having decided to lose it.
Rounding makes the same point on a smaller scale. A $237.40 item converts to 21,579,660 LBP at the owner's rate. With a written rule of rounding to the nearest 5,000, every customer sees 21,580,000. Without one, the figure depends on how the assistant happens to phrase it that day.
His conclusion from the example is that the assistant made no error. It used the information available. What was absent was a decision, and no amount of model capability substitutes for that.
What he suggests doing first
For a firm preparing to put an assistant in front of customers, Dr. Tebaa recommends three steps. Write the stamp as a single page. Give one named person responsibility for the rate line. Then take ten real past quotes and check which line each would have failed, counting failures by line to see where the business has been relying on memory.
He treats this as the other side of a problem he has written about before: the invoices Lebanese companies receive from AI vendors. The quote a company's own assistant sends out is a separate artefact, owned by sales and finance rather than procurement, and it deserves the same discipline.
The sentence he returns to is simple: a price is a decision, not a number. His advice is to make that decision before the assistant speaks.
Dr. Jonah Tebaa sets out the full five-line Price Stamp, with the worked arithmetic, in Before an AI Quotes a Price in Lebanon, Answer These Five Questions.
