Marcos Avina
Sales and policy in the same person. Marcos runs Callout’s sales floor — the first call, the diagnostic, the close — and spends the rest of his year in the rooms where AI is being governed: the UN Global Dialogue in Geneva, the Y20, the World Bank’s summit on the future of work. He knows what an AI agent can do for a small business because he sells one every day, and where the rules are heading because he’s read the drafts.
He got into this by running the business first.
Marcos’s first company was residential window washing — Mario & Squeegee, started while he was finishing his undergrad at UBC. His partner handled the front end; Marcos ran operations and sales. That was his first real lesson in what branding, search presence and paid advertising actually do to a service business.
Then study and travel, a master’s in public policy and global affairs at UBC with a semester at Berlin’s Hertie School, and a junior director role at a consultancy helping NGOs scale, market and fundraise — a team of twelve, through COVID, when every campaign budget in the sector was under pressure. Fluent in Spanish; he’ll happily take the call in either language.
Somewhere in there he converted a short school bus into a home with no mechanical, electrical or carpentry experience and nowhere to do the build. He lived in it for eight months through the US and Mexico, then brought it back to Canada and turned it into a rental business.
Why Callout
He’d been looking at artificial intelligence from the top down — the policy, the governance, the frameworks. He wanted the grassroots too: to actually use AI, to leverage it against tangible problems, and to know first-hand what it can do for a small business before saying a word about how it should be governed. Callout was precisely that. “I wanted fluency in both, at the same time — not one after the other.” Then a call with Rick: the same frustration with traditional agencies, complementary experience, and an offer to build the sales infrastructure from scratch. “That kind of energy is contagious.”
They care whether you can deliver on the promise, whether you can do it consistently, and whether they’re going to feel good about having hired you. Price objections are almost never about price.
- A $57,000 deal after two weeks of negotiation, for a Plan International campaign helping girls get birth certificates — mid-COVID, with the sector’s budgets collapsing
You can be completely prepared and it counts for nothing if you don’t understand the perspective of the person across the table. Resourcefulness and a human-centred read go further than a purely analytical one — in a negotiation and in a sales call.
Fluent on both sides: the sales floor and the policy room.
In July 2026 Marcos was in Geneva as a Canadian civil-society youth delegate at the inaugural UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance — the first forum bringing all 193 member states, industry, academia and civil society to one table on how AI gets governed. He worked the Bridging AI Divides and Human Rights clusters, stayed for the AI for Good Global Summit that followed, and will be back for the second Dialogue in 2027.
It wasn’t his first multilateral room. He was Canada’s delegate on the climate track at the 2025 Y20 summit in South Africa, drafting and defending language against pushback from other national delegations, and a delegate at the World Bank Youth Summit 2026 in Washington — Future Works: Designing Jobs for the Digital Age — where the conversation was how AI is going to reshape the labour market, and who it lands on first. This fall he joins the Young Transatlantic Leadership Initiative as one of six Canadians in a German-Canadian leadership exchange across Düsseldorf and Berlin, built around Strukturwandel — how companies, workers and governments respond when the structure of an economy changes under them.
None of that is the job. What it gives him is a read most agencies don’t have: where AI is actually heading, the impact it’s about to have on small businesses, and what the adoption numbers look like from the top down. So when he’s sitting across from an owner deciding whether to put an agent on the phone, the advice comes from someone who has seen both ends of it.
Consent, transparency, what an agent has to say about itself, where your data lives — those decisions are being drafted this year. You’re ahead of it, not reacting to it.
“Governance is behind the technology. Everyone’s told to be careful with AI, and almost nobody’s helped to actually use it. That’s the gap — in policy and in business.”
The questions he actually likes answering.
“Two things, connected — a digital presence that doesn’t earn the click, and no dedicated effort to turn the lead that does come in into a customer. Most owners only fix one.”
“Nothing about the tools — everything about the timing. The rules are being written now, by people who have never run a truck. If you’re a service business, the window to adopt AI on your own terms is open, and it won’t stay open.”
“No place to build it, no experience, no plan B. Eight months through the States and Mexico, then a rental business. It’s how I think about every build.”
Book fifteen minutes with Marcos.
He’ll ask what you’re building toward and what’s standing in the way, and tell you straight whether we can help. It’s a gut-check both ways.