Example · As a mid-size company

How does a machine builder automate quote creation with AI?

The system makes the draft, a person sets the price. An enquiry comes in, and the AI finds the closest earlier quotes and takes the prices from your own list. The next morning a draft is waiting, with the open points marked. Two weeks become two days. It runs on your infrastructure, and nobody has to change a system.

Martin Betz · AI Traction · 6 September 2026

Why does a quote take two weeks in machine building?

A machine builder with sixty people gets an enquiry. Whoever writes the quote first digs out the last five similar ones, checks the price list and asks production about lead times. Only then does the actual thinking start. What does the customer really want, what fits from the existing range, where will it get tight.

Honestly, nobody is slow here. The digging is simply work that sits next to the day job, and it waits until someone has time. Meanwhile the customer has two other quotes on the table. This is the work that matters and still doesn't happen.

What does the AI do, and what does it leave alone?

It does the part that consists of searching and assembling:

• It reads the enquiry and pulls the closest matches from your own archive. Your quotes, nobody else's.
• It takes the line items and the prices from your own list, never from a guess.
• It builds a draft in your structure and marks what is open: an unclear quantity, a special material, a lead time production has to confirm.

The person who used to spend two days assembling now spends an hour checking. The quote goes out in two days.

What does the first build look like, and how long does it take?

It starts with a conversation. Thirty minutes on how quotes come about in your company today and whether this is worth touching at all. If it is, we sit down with the person who writes the quotes and go through the last twenty. That tells us what a good draft has to contain and where the prices come from.

The first build usually takes two to three weeks and attaches to what you already run. Enquiries arrive by mail, quotes sit as PDFs in a folder, the price list is a spreadsheet. That is enough. Connecting the ERP is a second step, once the first one runs.

After that we keep improving it. Every draft someone corrects shows what the system still lacks. After a few weeks the corrections get small, and that is the moment the thing actually saves time.

What about our prices and drawings?

Whatever mustn't leave your building doesn't. The system runs on infrastructure you own, connected to your own accounts. Where an external model is fine and where it isn't, we settle in writing before anything gets built. For price lists and drawings that usually means they stay on your server.

Is it worth it at twenty quotes a month?

Do the sum yourself: the hours that go into assembling each quote, times the quotes per month. Add the quotes that arrived too late. That is the number we talk about on the call, and on that first call we also say what the build costs. Of course there are cases where it isn't worth it. Then we say so.