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AI agents for wholesale RFQ clarification
Short answer
At a wholesaler, an AI agent completes a request for quote before pricing: it finds the customer's earlier order, recognises missing parameters such as the unit or the variant, and writes questions for the salesperson. It adds no technical parameters of its own. The agent costs from €3,000 net at Syntalith and, with 300 requests for quotes a month at 12 minutes each, pays back in 2.1 months.
How we workDetails ↓
- 01Call30 minutes with an engineer, free
- 02PrototypeA working system on your process and data, free
- 03ImplementationTarget and fixed price in the contract; 50% at signing
- 04Acceptance50% once the agreed target is met
- net per agent for one process, build paid once
- from €3,000
- from signing the contract to acceptance
- 6–16 weeks
- free prototype on your cases
- €0
We belong to the OpenAI and Anthropic partner programmes and learn through their official courses. What this means ↓
Author: Syntalith · 3 min read
Statistics
Wholesale and AI: statistics 2026
2.1 mo.
payback of a €3,000 agent with 300 requests for quotes a month: €2,094 of work today, €636 with checking and the model. Scenario.
47%
According to the European Commission (2026), customer service is the most common use of AI among EU SMEs and mid-caps that already use it: 47%.
Source: European Commission, Flash Eurobarometer on AI and algorithmic management (2026) ↗
23.4%
According to Eurostat (2025), 23.4% of EU wholesale trade enterprises with at least 10 employees used AI.
Source: Eurostat, Artificial intelligence by NACE Rev. 2 activity (isoc_eb_ain2) (2025) ↗
130
According to Gartner (2025), only about 130 of the thousands of AI agent vendors offer real agentic solutions.
90%
According to the European Commission (2026), 90% of companies that use AI say people take the decisions, and 2% of decisions are fully automated.
Source: European Commission, Flash Eurobarometer on AI and algorithmic management (2026) ↗
Figures checked: 22 October 2026
„The same as last time”
A customer writes: „Please quote for the same valves as last time, 40 units”. Another attaches a photo of a rating plate, a third sends a list without units. The salesperson looks for the previous order, asks about the diameter and the pressure, passes the case to a specialist and goes back to the customer. Each of these enquiries takes a quarter of an hour before pricing even begins.
The agent finds the customer's previous order and shows the line the customer probably means, as a suggestion to confirm. It recognises the gaps: the unit, the variant, the date. It writes one question that covers all the gaps at once, so the customer does not have to reply three times. The salesperson sees what comes from the customer, what from the history and what is a suggestion. An empty field stays empty when the choice of product depends on that information, because the system adds no technical parameters to make the form look complete.
| Situation | What to check first |
|---|---|
| The same fields are always missing | a better form or required fields in the portal |
| The data is complete and has to be retyped | an integration with the sales system |
| Someone has to understand the correspondence and choose the question | an AI agent |
| The choice of product needs an engineer's judgement | preparing the case and passing it to a specialist |
- One product group and one enquiry channel
- An owner of the catalogue, naming and substitutes
- Limits on access to the customer's history and commercial terms
- An owner of the exceptions queue
What it costs and when it pays back
- Today
- 300 requests for quotes × 12 min = 60 h (€2,094)
- With the system, a person checks the output in 30% of the time
- €628
- Model, 2 calls per case, Claude Sonnet 5.5
- €8
- Cost of one case
- €6.98 today, €2.12 with the system
- Saving
- €1,458 a month
Payback of €3,000
2.1 months
The volume, the time and the checking share are the scenario's assumptions. €34.90 an hour is the EU average hourly labour cost for 2025 according to Eurostat. Model: 5,000 input and 500 output tokens per call at Anthropic's rates, converted at the ECB rate of 1.1205 USD per euro on 22 October 2026.
The count covers the work around a case: searching, reading, writing and passing things on. What remains is the time to check the output, 30% of today's work in the scenario. Before the quote we measure both times on 20 to 100 cases the team has already handled, in a €0 test that takes 5 working days.
A fixed workflow or an agent
Anthropic describes the difference between a fixed workflow and an agent: a workflow carries out set steps, while an agent chooses the next ones itself. When enquiries always miss the same fields, a form or a fixed workflow is enough. An agent makes sense when someone has to understand the correspondence and choose a question for the specific gap. In enquiries, trade abbreviations, variants and units matter, so we start the pilot with one product group.
The same fields are always missing
a form or a portal with required fields
no model
Complete data to retype
an integration with the sales system
from €3,000
Free-form enquiries, customer history, trade abbreviations
an agent that completes the enquiry
from €3,000
Where to start
Prepare a few anonymised enquiries that needed many clarifications, and one that was handled smoothly. The comparison will show whether the difficulty lies in the data, the process or the integration. We build this as part of AI agents. For the free process review, a description of one case from recent weeks and the tools it ran through is enough. You do not need to send confidential documents, and you get a written plan within 2 working days.
Worked example · Scenario
How we count the payback: AI in wholesale
We run the same count for your enquiries in the free process review.
€5,584
a month for retyping 1,200 orders by hand
Payback: 0.6 mo.
8 minutes to retype an order and checking in 15% of the old time are our assumptions. €34.90 an hour is the EU average hourly labour cost for 2025 according to Eurostat, for companies with 10 or more employees. Model cost: reading the order in our system (about €0.0006) plus matching the lines (Claude Sonnet 5.5, about 3,000 + 500 tokens), at the ECB rate of 1.1205 USD per euro on 22 October 2026.
See the full calculation →
