What data does an AI assistant need to prepare quotes?
An AI assistant preparing quotes needs current information about the customer and enquiry, pricing rules, a history of comparable quotes, material and capacity availability, and clear approval limits. Every source must have a known owner and its currency must be verified. The output should remain a draft for human review until the company has reliably verified the accuracy of the entire process.
The minimum set of inputs
- Details of the customer, the enquiry and the requested deadline.
- A valid price list and rules for margins, discounts and surcharges.
- A history of comparable quotes, including their outcomes.
- Bills of materials, process instructions or another basis for costing.
- Current material availability and actual production capacity.
- Commercial, payment and delivery terms for the specific customer.
- Limits above which the quote must be approved by the responsible person.
Reliability matters more than quantity
Ten years of history will not help if the company changed how it calculates prices and never documented the change. A current stock level will not help if receipts are recorded two days late.
For every input, you therefore need to know its source, age, owner and the situations in which it cannot be trusted.
What a safe output should look like
AI prepares a draft quote and shows the source material it used. A person checks the price, deadline and non-standard terms, then sends the result.
Sending quotes automatically without review makes sense only for precisely defined standard cases, and only if the company has verified the error rate in advance and set limits.
Your next step
Together, we will verify whether the sources used to prepare quotes are reliable enough and where human approval should remain.
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