There's a version of a customer day that goes through the motions; a few slides, a coffee, a polite round of applause, and everyone's back in their cars by 3pm, or logging off Team's. We were determined ours wouldn't be that.
Last week, we hosted our first ever Apexiar Customer Day, bringing together a mix of new and existing customers from across three very different industries: energy, rail, and fire and rescue. The brief for the day was simple, show what we've built, put it through its paces across sectors, and have honest conversations about where things go next.
What actually happened was better than we planned.
Why We Wanted to Do This
We talk to customers constantly, demos, onboarding calls, support, roadmap reviews. But there's something different about getting people in the same room (or a virtual room). Conversations take on a different energy. People ask questions they wouldn't type into an email. Ideas come up that nobody had thought to suggest before.
For those who were able to attend in person, we also wanted our new customers to meet our existing ones. Not as a sales exercise, but because the people already running our platforms day-to-day are the most credible voices we have. Their experience, their stories, and their honest assessment of what works (and what we're still improving) is more valuable than anything we could put in a brochure.
Testing Ourselves Across Three Industries
One of the things we were deliberate about was pushing the platform across genuinely different use cases in real time. Energy, rail, and fire and rescue aren't just different sectors, they have fundamentally different operational cultures, risk profiles, and compliance requirements.
We walked through how Artemis adapts to asset management in each context. How AMIS handles the very different nature of incidents in a rail environment versus a fire and rescue service. How the workflows that make sense for a substations team don't always map cleanly onto a depot maintenance team, and how we've built for that flexibility.
It was, honestly, a useful challenge for us too. Putting your own product through its paces in front of customers across three sectors in a single day keeps you sharp. It surfaces the rough edges. It also surfaces the moments where the platform genuinely surprises people, and those are the moments worth building on.
The Room Was Engaged….. Really Engaged
You can usually tell within the first twenty minutes of a day like this whether people are genuinely interested or just being polite. The energy in the room told us everything we needed to know.
Customers were asking questions before we'd finished making points. People were comparing notes with each other across industries, turns out a compliance challenge in fire and rescue has more overlap with a rail audit requirement than either team expected. Conversations that started in the morning were still going over lunch.
That kind of proactive engagement is exactly what you hope for and rarely take for granted. These are busy people with demanding jobs. The fact that they were leaning in rather than checking their phones meant a lot to us.
What We Took Away
Days like this generate a lot of output, notes, follow-ups, feature requests, connection requests. But beyond the logistics, a few things stood out.
First, the value of cross-sector conversation. Our customers don't often get to compare operational challenges with peers from different industries. Several people told us it was one of the most useful parts of the day, not our platform, just the conversation. We'll be building more of that into how we work.
Second, the depth of what our existing customers have built with the platform. Hearing how teams have adapted workflows, built processes around the tools, and found efficiencies we hadn't explicitly designed for was genuinely humbling. They've taken what we gave them and made it their own.
Third, and most directly, the volume of follow-up conversations we have in the pipeline. Not in a "leads generated" sense, but real discussions about real problems we can help solve. New integrations, expanded deployments, capabilities people want to see on the roadmap. The kind of conversations that become the next twelve months of development.
Lastly, our combination of products Axis and Atom stole the day, even in industries where these products would probably not add much value. The feedback on our Machine Learning LLM, and the live-data telemetry really got people talking. We're super excited about these two products… more to come on this, in a future blog.
What Comes Next
We're already working through the follow-ups. There are feature conversations in progress, deployment discussions underway, and a few things we heard on the day that have genuinely changed how we're thinking about parts of the roadmap.
More importantly, we're planning to make this a regular thing. The format worked, the feedback was clear, and the value of bringing customers together, new and existing, across industries, is something we want to build on rather than treat as a one-off.
Two potential new customers were understandably unable to attend on the day (largely down to us, and late notification – lesson learnt!) we have made commitments to have follow-up meetings at their sites, which we are very much looking forward to.
Our lasting impression was that, we're definitely not sales people or marketers, neither will we pretend to be, thankfully our products do a lot of the leg work for us!
If you weren't there this time and would like to be part of the next one, get in touch. We'd love to have you in the room (or on Team's if that suits).
To everyone who came and gave their time, genuinely, thank you. Days like this are the reason we do what we do.