The routine quotes answered in three minutes. Your reps on the rest.
An AI agent that reads inbound RFQs — email, PDF, spreadsheets — checks them against your catalog, and sends back a priced quote with a checkout link. The ones it shouldn't answer go to your rep with the whole thread attached.
Six weeks to production · Built on the catalog you already maintain
Two of those three close without a rep opening the message. The third reaches one with the work already done.
Thirty minutes to four hours. Sometimes the next day.
That's where most distributors we talk to land on a routine quote. Not because anyone is slow — a person has to open the email, work out which SKU "1/2 3000# thrd ball" means, check whether the price is still current, and type the reply.
Twelve minutes of someone's attention, and only during business hours. In most quote inboxes, the bulk of those requests needed no judgment at all — a clear ask for stocked items the catalog can already price.
Meanwhile the competitor who answered first is taking the order.
Every request evaluated in seconds. The routine ones answered.
Email, PDF, spreadsheet or web form — it reads whatever arrives, from a named account or a buyer you have never heard from. Before anyone is involved, it establishes four things.
Thresholds are configurable and start conservative. Every decision is logged — what it read, what it concluded, and what it did.
Customers don't send clean POs.
They send partial part numbers, descriptions instead of SKUs, and spreadsheets where a third of the rows are yours. Rules-based automation breaks there. This doesn't — it matches on description, asks the customer to confirm between close matches, and hands off to a person when it shouldn't guess.
Four questions, up front.
Silk Commerce has built B2B commerce for distributors and manufacturers for over a decade. Premier Epicor Agency Partner.
Bring us your ugliest RFQ
Thirty minutes. We'll run your own request formats through it live — the messy spreadsheet, the partial part number, the one nobody wants to quote.
We'll reply within one business day.
No slides. Your inbox formats, your catalog, live.