You know the email. The subject line says “quote please.” The body is thirty-four part numbers in no particular order — some of them yours, some of them a competitor’s, a few described rather than named. It lands with whoever is closest to the inbox, and it costs that person about fifteen minutes: crossing the list against the catalog, checking stock, chasing pricing, sorting out the lines that came back ugly. ERP in one tab, a supplier portal in another, and the spreadsheet somebody built in 2021 that everybody still swears by.
Fifteen minutes, and none of it is selling.
Why quoting costs more in high-technology distribution
For automation solution providers, the clerical layer on a quote is thicker than it is in most channels. A single request can span several manufacturer lines, each with its own numbering logic. Customers ask for parts by description as often as by number — “the same proximity sensor we put on line three” — or by a competitor’s number that has to be cross-referenced before anything else can happen. Parts get superseded. Configured items need a specification pass before a price exists at all.
And the person doing that work is usually not a clerk. It is an inside salesperson who knows the account, or an application engineer whose real value is in solving the customer’s problem. Every list typed by hand is technical capacity spent on transcription.
What’s changing?
In July, Proton.ai released Order & Quote Entry Automation, built to take that first pass off the rep’s desk. The software reads customer requests wherever they arrive — email body, spreadsheet attachment, PDF, scanned document — interprets what is being asked for, identifies the products against the distributor’s own catalog and customer-specific pricing, recommends substitutes when something is unavailable, and returns a draft quote along with a draft reply to the customer. Reps can also enter a request by voice while they are still on the phone.
Early results
One of North America’s largest industrial distributors ran a structured test against the cross-reference system it had built in-house. On the hardest, description-only lists, Proton found the right part without human help three times as often as the internal system, and list preparation time dropped 75 percent. Those figures come from the distributor’s own testing.
Building Products Inc., a Midwestern wholesale building materials distributor, is an early customer. “The dream has always been: a customer emails apart list, and the order just happens,” said Cas Rangel, Chief Information & Technology Officer. “Proton is the first vendor I’ve seen actually build toward that — and they ship faster than anyone we work with. Feedback we give in one call shows up in the product by the next.”
The part that matters more than the minutes
Time savings are the easy pitch, and also the least interesting part of the story. Fifteen minutes returned to an inside salesperson is only worth something if it goes somewhere useful — which accounts are due for a call, which products a customer should be buying and is not, which quote from three weeks ago never got followed up.
That is a sales management question more than a software question, and it is better answered before the efficiency arrives than after. Distributors who have thought it through tend to get compounding value from order entry automation. Distributors who have not tend to get a slightly shorter workday.
ABOUT PROTON.AI
Founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Proton.ai builds AI software purpose-built for wholesale distributors — CRM, product information management, ecommerce and sales operations on a single data layer. Founder and CEO Benj Cohen is a fourth-generation distributor; his great-grandfather started a dental supply business in 1930.
WEB LINKS
○ https://distributionstrategy.com/2026/07/proton-ai-launches-ai-platform-to-automate-order-and-quote-entry-for-distributors/
○ https://www.mdm.com/news/breaking-news-in-wholesale-distribution/proton-ai-launches-automated-order-quote-entry-system/
○ https://contractorsupplymagazine.com/pages/News_260802_Protonai-Launches-Agentic-Order-&-Quote-Entry-Automation-System.php
