Every distributor we spoke to has the same quiet bottleneck, and none of them call it a problem. They call it Tuesday.
A request for quote lands in a shared inbox. Sometimes it is a tidy bulleted list. More often it is three lines of text from someone's phone, or a PDF that was scanned at an angle. Someone on the sales desk reads it, works out which catalog part each line actually refers to, checks pricing, and types up a quote. A busy desk does this thirty or forty times a day.
It is slow, it is boring, and it is exactly the kind of work where a tired person on a Friday afternoon quotes the wrong bolt and nobody notices until the shipment arrives.
We spent three weeks building Distill.ai to do that job. This is what we learned, including the parts that went badly.
What we actually built
