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ASCEND CONSULT · FIELD NOTES

AI does the typing. Your inside sales team does the selling.

· 2 min read · Ascend Consult

  • industrial
  • quotes
  • order entry

For suppliers and job shops, the bottleneck is rarely the phone. It's the inbox: PDF purchase orders, emailed RFQs, and someone retyping all of it into the system before anything can be quoted or shipped.

What one distributor did

Millcraft Paper's president, Travis Mlakar, described it in a 2024 trade interview:

  • AI reads emailed purchase orders, pulls out the PO number, quantities and item numbers, and creates the order.
  • About 30% of all transactions now run through it.
  • "Our customer service reps don't need to do any data entry."

Asked whether AI must mean job loss, his answer was "It doesn't have to." Instead of re-keying orders, his reps make proactive outbound calls.

He was also candid about the start: employees "were threatened" at first. About nine months later, they backed the next system change.

A person still checks the work

At the Howard Elliott Collection, a home-accents wholesaler:

  • order entry used to take 3–4 hours a day;
  • the AI now processes an order in about 15 minutes, and a staff member reviews each one in about 5.

"It's saving hours of time every day for my team," says its VP, Colleen Daly. (Vendor-reported.)

That review step is the point. The AI drafts, a person confirms, and the customer gets a correct order sooner.

Where it pays for a Katy or Houston supplier

  • RFQs typed in before your estimator opens them, so the quote goes out the same day while the buyer is still deciding.
  • POs checked against the quote automatically, with differences flagged for a person to settle.
  • Spanish-language requests written up in English for your team, and answered in Spanish.

Your inside sales team spends the hours on what only they can do: pricing, relationships, the follow-up call.

Curious how many hours your team spends retyping? Try the calculator on our home page, or request a 20-minute fit conversation.

Sources