AI agents · Quotation agent
Quotation agent: read the inquiry, draft the quote — your sales team approves
A quotation agent takes the groundwork off your sales team: analysing the inquiry and the specification, finding comparable past quotes, preparing line items and text. What goes out is still decided by a person.
The situation
The everyday problem
An inquiry arrives by email: a forty-page specification as a PDF, a drawing, and a request for a quote by Friday. Someone in inside sales reads it all, marks up the requirements, searches the ERP for a similar order from three years ago, checks with engineering, copies boilerplate from an old quote and adapts it.
That is skilled people spending their time searching. And it does not scale: when five inquiries arrive at once, four of them wait. Some never get quoted at all, because nobody has time to read the specification properly. And the knowledge of which past quote makes a good template usually sits with two or three experienced people.
How it works
What the quotation agent actually does
Capture the inquiry
The agent picks up the incoming inquiry from the mailbox or a shared folder — email body, specification, attachments.
Extract the requirements
It lists the requirements from the specification in a structured way: quantities, materials, tolerances, standards, dates, delivery terms. Every line points to the place in the document it came from.
Flag gaps and contradictions
If information is missing, if drawing and text disagree, or if there is an unusual contract clause, it goes onto a list of questions for the customer.
Find comparable cases
It searches past quotes and orders for similar cases and shows what was offered back then — and whether it turned into an order.
Write the draft
In your quote template: line items, scope description, standard text. Prices come from your price lists or the ERP; where no price is stored, the field stays open and is flagged.
Hand over to sales
The draft goes to the person responsible, with sources and the list of open questions. They review, change, add — and approve.
Integration
Connected systems
- ERP
- Item master, price lists, past orders and quotes
- CRM
- Customer history, contacts, open opportunities
- SharePoint or file shares
- Templates, data sheets, certificates, reference descriptions
- Incoming inquiries and attachments
Two or three good sources are usually enough to start with. Which ones are authoritative in your company is something we work out in the workshop.
Approval stays with people
The agent prepares, your sales team decides. No quote leaves the building without someone having read and approved it. Who may approve which quotes is your call — just as it is today.
What the agent deliberately does not do
- It does not do costing. Prices, discounts and margins stay with sales and costing. The agent uses the prices on file and flags what is missing.
- It does not commit to delivery dates. Dates depend on your production, not on a language model.
- It sends nothing. Sending stays a deliberate step taken by your team.
- It does not make things up. Anything it cannot find in your documents is marked as open rather than guessed.
On your own servers if you wish
Costings and customer inquiries are among the data many companies do not want to hand to someone else’s cloud. That is why the quotation agent can run entirely on your own servers. Then no specification and no price leaves your network — because the setup does not allow it, not because a contract says so.
On-premise AIGetting started
How to get started
First call, 30 minutes, free
We work out whether a quotation agent is the right place for you to start.
Workshop
One day at your site. We look at your quoting process using a real case: where is time lost, what data exists, who approves?
The first agent
We build it on your data, and your team tests it against real inquiries.
We run the quotation agent in our own business. So the building blocks exist — what differs in your company are the templates, the vocabulary and the approval rules.
FAQ
Questions about the quotation agent
Does the agent calculate the prices as well?
No. It uses the prices stored in your price lists or the ERP and flags every line item without a price. Costing stays with the people responsible for it.
Does it work with our quote template?
Yes. The agent writes into your existing template, with your standard text and your structure. Your customers will not notice any difference in form — only that the quote can arrive sooner.
What happens with incomplete specifications?
The agent produces a list of questions: what information is missing, where drawing and text contradict each other, which clauses stand out. You can pass it straight on to the customer.
What data does the agent need?
Past quotes, price lists, product and service descriptions. The more cleanly past quotes are filed, the better the suggestions. If the data is not good enough for a useful agent, we tell you in the workshop — before you invest in one.
Does the agent replace our inside sales team?
No. It takes the searching off their hands, leaving more time for what people do better: the technical assessment, the conversation with the customer, the decision.
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Different tasks, the same building blocks
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Read moreSales agent
Prepares customer meetings, summarises conversations and drafts follow-ups — your sales team approves.
Read moreHow many inquiries are sitting in your inbox?
In a 30-minute first call we work out whether a quotation agent fits your company. Free, and no preparation needed.