How fast does a distributor have to answer a quote to win?

The first order that came back without a human touching it was a rounding error, and the chief commercial officer put it in front of the board anyway.

At a national distributor of industrial automation components, about one in ten inbound quote requests arrived through the website contact form. AI agents took that queue in late 2025. In the first month they answered more than six thousand emails and returned roughly fifteen hundred quotes, escalating to a human only when it required one.

Industry

Industrial automation distribution

Who uses it

Inside sales

What it does

Inbound quote automation

Measured

First 30 days post-launch, late 2025

On a Friday morning in October, the company's chief commercial officer joined a video call with his team and interrupted the agenda to brag.

"We had our first order," he told them. "First order that came through our AI-based system. Literally the automated emails going back and forth, and boom, we got a PO."

It was one purchase order. At a distributor with revenue in the hundreds of millions, that is a rounding error. He called it a historic moment anyway, then asked his team to send him a copy so he could put it on a slide for the board.

To understand why one order mattered that much, you have to understand the situation.

The company distributes the industrial automation components that keep factory floors running. When a machine goes down, a plant manager needs a replacement now, not tomorrow. Several thousand people a day were reaching out across email, phone and the website. That was more than the team could answer.

"We didn't even know how bad it was," the CCO said. "We kind of knew that it sucked, and we were leaving a lot of emails and phones and a lot of revenue on the table."

In a break-fix business, response time is not a service metric. It is the business.

Median response time was three to four hours.

Pressure came from several directions at once. The chief executive wanted to move the company from what he called a traditional distributor to a full-blown tech-enabled solutions provider. The private equity sponsor was asking how the company was using AI. And the CCO, five months into the role, had a list of twenty-five things he already knew were broken.

Rather than attack all of it, they took the smallest slice they could find. Quote requests arriving through the website contact form, roughly a tenth of inbound volume.

"We always wanted to spend time here and see if it can work," the chief executive said, "and then start working up the chain from a complexity perspective."

InstaLILY agents took that one queue. They read the incoming request, identify the part, check availability and pricing, and email the customer back. No human in the loop unless the request needs one.

Within two months the company counted more than ten thousand hours a year returned to the business and roughly six inside-sales reps' worth of capacity unlocked without hiring anyone.

The numbers were not why the CCO wanted it. He was blunt with his team about what he was buying. The company has roughly ninety inside sales reps. Some are excellent. Some are not.

"The goal here is not to duplicate what the internal sales rep is doing," he said. "It is what the internal sales rep should be doing."

Take the top twenty reps, figure out what good actually looks like, and encode it, "so the remaining bottom 50, 60, 70 percent come up to that average."

The operations lead running the rollout put the math more plainly. Strip out the research and lookup work so reps can build relationships and chase bigger opportunities. "If we're going to double, we need them to double their efficiency, unless we start cloning them."

Asked what success would ultimately look like, the CCO did not reach for a percentage.

"My nirvana here is zero backlog for every internal sales rep, and the response time is less than one hour."