Participant Journey

From the Classroom to the CRM: How a Non-Technical CEO Built AI Tools That Run His Company Every Week

When Erick Villalobos, CEO of Singapore's Evermove Engineering, attended the NUS Business School Executive Education course AI for Talent Management and Organizational Design in early 2025, he was 39 years old, ran a 52-year-old company, and had never written a line of code. Six months later, his company runs a fully custom AI-built CRM, with no developers, no budget, and no technical team. This is the story of how a strategic mindset, not technical skill, made the difference.

• AI Strategy
• Executive Education
• No-Code AI Tools
• Organisational Change
• People Analytics
• Sales Operations
• Singapore Business
• SME Digital Transformation

The better the question

4,000 customers. 12 years of data. No way to act on any of it.

The data was there. The problem was that nobody could see it, or do anything with it.

When Erick Villalobos acquired Evermove Engineering in October 2025, he inherited a company with more than five decades of history in Singapore’s industrial supplies market, and a dataset that told that story in full. Twelve years of transaction records. Roughly 4,000 customer accounts. Every purchase, every lapse, every category of castor wheel and industrial component ever ordered. It was all there.

But it was invisible. Evermove had no data team, no IT department, and no way to turn that history into a question as simple as “who should we call this week?” A previous attempt at a CRM in a prior company had cost S$25,000 and was abandoned on the first day. It didn’t fit how the team actually worked. The lesson Erick had taken from that experience was blunt: technology for its own sake is money thrown away.

What the business needed was not a technology solution. It needed a clear question. And Erick didn’t yet know how to ask it.

Raw data, no insight. No team, no budget, no time. And a previous CRM that cost $25,000 and was never used, not once.

— Erick Villalobos, CEO, Evermove Engineering & General Supplies

The challenge was structural. To extract any meaningful pattern from the transaction database, a business analyst would previously have needed advanced Excel skills, hours of manual work, and a clear sense of what to look for in the first place. Erick had none of those resources, and, critically, wasn’t sure what questions he should even be asking of the data he had.

He knew which customers had bought before. He didn’t know which ones had stopped, or why, or whether they were worth pursuing. He didn’t know which market segments were underserved, or whether his sales team was spending their time on the right calls. The data held the answers. But without a way to access them, it might as well not have existed.

The better the answer

A course that changed how he thought — not what he knew

The NUS Executive Education programme didn’t teach Erick to code. It taught him to see AI as a strategic tool and to ask better questions.

In February 2025, Erick enrolled in the NUS Business School Executive Education programme: AI for Talent Management and Organizational Design. He arrived as a self-described non-technical CEO, someone whose career had been built on agricultural supply chains, international sales, and the hands-on work of turning around companies in difficulty. He had managed teams of hundreds, navigated bank loans, and led a Costa Rican fruit company to over USD 100 million in annual sales. He had never thought of himself as a technology person.

What the course shifted was not his technical knowledge; it was his mental model of what AI is for. Instead of approaching AI as a system that required engineers and specifications, he began to see it as something far more accessible: a tool that responds to clear thinking. The bottleneck, the course made clear, was not code. It was clarity of thought about the problem you were trying to solve.

The course taught me to think about AI as a strategic partner, not a technology to fear.

— Erick Villalobos, CEO, Evermove Engineering & General Supplies

The outcome

A working CRM in two hours — with plain English and no code

Armed with a clearer way of thinking, Erick went back to his business and described his problem out loud, in full, to an AI.

Returning from the course, Erick sat down with Manus, an AI agent, and described his situation in plain English. No technical specification. No wireframe. No developer brief. He described the data he had, the insight he was missing, and the action he wanted to be able to take: knowing which customers to call, when to call them, and in what order. Manus offered several options. One was building a custom CRM from scratch.

Two hours later, a working version of the CRM was running on Evermove’s real company data. Within one week of daily use, testing, and iteration, the tool was refined to the point where it could generate the sales team’s weekly call schedule automatically. The first month saw improvements every two weeks as new needs surfaced. Now the cycle is monthly, each session adding a feature, fixing an edge case, or adapting to a new business question.

The only skill you need is the ability to describe your problem clearly.

— Erick Villalobos, CEO, Evermove Engineering & General Supplies

Erick is a trilingual business leader from Costa Rica, now based in Singapore, with a track record spanning agricultural engineering, international sales, and company turnarounds across Latin America and Southeast Asia. He holds a degree in Agronomic Engineering from EARTH University and has studied Mandarin at Hebei Normal University of Science and Technology. He completed the Senior Executive Programme jointly run by INCAE Business School and NUS, and holds a Board of Directors certification from INCAE.

As CEO of Productos Agropecuarios Visa in Costa Rica from 2019 to 2024, he led the company through the pandemic without redundancies and grew annual revenues to over USD 100 million, a 20% year-on-year growth trajectory. Since relocating to Singapore in 2025, he has founded Villalobos Trading Pte. Ltd. (the Biru pineapple brand) and acquired Evermove Engineering & General Supplies, returning the 52-year-old business to profitability within six months.

He attended the NUS Business School Executive Education course AI for Talent Management and Organizational Design in February 2025, which he described as having opened his eyes to AI as a strategic tool rather than a technical one. He subsequently built and deployed a custom AI-powered CRM for Evermove, and later returned to NUS to share his experience as a guest lecturer in the NUS MBA programme.

Connect with Erick on LinkedIn ↗

Find out about Evermove Engineering ↗

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