Is AI quoting accurate enough for real distributor pricing?
No, and no honest vendor claims 100 percent. The right question is whether errors are visible and controlled before a customer sees them. Quoting.ai Supply prices from your ERP's customer price levels, a deterministic read rather than a model guess, and flags any line it cannot resolve instead of filling it in. Every draft lands in an approval inbox, and the Human Edit Rate, how often your reviewer corrects a draft, is measured and shown. You choose the mode, Assist, Guarded, or Autopilot, and raise autonomy only when your own numbers earn it. Accuracy here is a metric you watch, not a claim you take.
Can AI hit 100 percent accuracy on distributor quotes?
No. Requests arrive as emails, PDF attachments, WhatsApp voice notes, faxes, and voicemails, written in whatever shorthand the customer uses. Estimators we work with see a single request for a 10 watt light map to 50 or more catalog variants. Any system claiming perfect reads on that input is describing a demo, not a quoting desk.
So the design goal is different: no guess ever reaches a customer. Prices are not generated at all. They are read from the customer price levels in your ERP, and your item file enters the system as a data import, exact by construction. Deterministic wins where deterministic works. The AI does the part humans are slow at, reading the unstructured request and proposing SKU matches against your own item file, and any line it cannot resolve with confidence is flagged as a question, not filled in with a plausible answer.
Doesn't fixing AI output take longer than quoting from scratch?
Estimators burned by earlier tools say they would rather build the quote from the beginning than hunt for what a document generator got wrong. Against a black box, they are right. A finished-looking page full of silent errors forces you to proofread every line, and proofreading everything is slower than typing it yourself.
The approval inbox exists for exactly this. The original request sits next to the drafted lines, uncertain lines are flagged, and the reviewer's job is to resolve the flags and confirm, not to proofread a mystery. Distributors we talk to average about 30 minutes of desk work per quote, and most of that was never judgment. It was reading, matching, and typing. Review keeps the judgment and drops the typing.
How do you measure accuracy instead of trusting a claim?
Human Edit Rate: the share of drafted quotes your reviewers correct before sending. It is measured on your desk, against your catalog and your customers' shorthand, and shown to you. A vendor benchmark says nothing about how a system reads your item file. This number does.
It also settles the buy decision honestly. If the edit rate stays high after the first weeks, the tool is not working for your desk and the data says so. If it falls, you have earned grounds to lighten review. Either way the argument runs on numbers you can pull up, not on accuracy percentages from a slide.
What keeps a wrong quote from reaching a customer?
The mode you choose. In Assist, every quote is drafted and a human approves each one before anything leaves the building. Guarded lets clean drafts, fully matched and fully priced, move with lighter review while anything flagged waits for a person. Autopilot is the end state, not the starting point, and it is earned per desk by a Human Edit Rate that stays low.
None of this is zero-touch by default. The control dial is yours, and turning it up is a decision you make with your own measurements in hand.
Related questions
Where do the prices come from?
From the customer price levels in your ERP, read directly, not predicted. With DDI Inform and Spruce, approved quotes also write back to the ERP. Epicor, NetSuite, and SAP integrations are in development, and an ERP-light mode covers other systems in the meantime.
What happens when a line cannot be matched?
It is flagged as a question for the reviewer instead of being filled in. A flagged line costs seconds of human attention. A guessed price that ships costs the customer's trust.
Should we start in Autopilot?
No. Start in Assist, watch the Human Edit Rate on your own catalog, and move to Guarded or Autopilot only when the numbers hold. Setup is two steps, connect your inbox and upload inventory, with a white-glove kickoff call included to get the rollout right.
See it on your own work
Distributors: two steps and a kickoff call. Estimators: upload a plan on a live trade. Either way, the product proves it or it does not.