ai agents for wholesale & distribution

Your order desk spends the day retyping POs your customers already typed

The warehouse ships on time. It's the desk work around every order that eats the day: POs arriving as PDFs, vendor price files nobody has opened, backorder emails, reps calling in for stock and pricing. We install AI agents that take over that layer, so the same inside sales team can push through more orders without adding headcount.

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the manual reality

Every order gets typed twice: once by the customer, once by you

Walk the order desk at any 40-person distributor at 9 a.m. and you'll see the same routine. A stack of POs came in overnight — one as a PDF attachment, one as an Excel order form, one typed straight into the email, one a fax scan of a handwritten sheet. Someone retypes each line into the ERP, translating the customer's part numbers into your SKUs as they go. One typo and the wrong case quantity ships.

Meanwhile a supplier's new cost sheet sits unopened because applying 3,000 line changes takes an afternoon nobody has. A rep is on hold with his own company asking what one account pays for one SKU. And a customer just discovered their backorder slipped by calling you, which is the worst possible way for them to find out. None of this work is hard. All of it is constant.

POs arrive as PDFs, spreadsheets, and fax scans, and each one gets retyped
Customer part numbers rarely match your SKUs, so every line needs a lookup
Vendor cost updates wait weeks while stale pricing quietly leaks margin
Reps burn selling time chasing price, stock, and order-status answers

agentclaw · workflow run

$ claw run invoice-intake

→ 47 documents queued

→ extracted · matched · posted

✓ done in 3m 12s · 0 exceptions escalated

what we install

Agents that work the order desk, not just a chatbot

Every agent below runs inside the systems you already have: your ERP, your inbox, your price files. Humans approve anything that touches an order or a customer until you decide they don't need to.

order entry

POs entered before your cutoff, without the retyping

An agent watches the orders inbox and reads each PO, whether it arrives as a PDF attachment, an Excel order form, or lines typed straight into the email. It matches the customer's part numbers against your item master and their order history, drafts the sales order in your ERP with contract pricing applied, and flags what's off — a price that doesn't match the agreement, a quantity below MOQ, a ship-to address you've never shipped to.

pricing

Vendor price files applied the week they arrive

When a supplier emails a new cost sheet, the agent compares it line by line against your current costs, applies your margin rules, and stages the price updates for approval. Items where the new cost pushes margin below your floor get flagged for a human decision instead of slipping through. Customer-specific price lists regenerate from the same pass, so your reps quote from numbers that are actually current.

inventory

Backorder news your customers hear from you first

The moment a line goes on backorder, the agent drafts the customer notification with the expected date pulled from your open purchase orders. If the inbound PO slips, it re-checks every affected order and updates those customers too. Nobody finds out their job site is short by calling you on delivery day.

rep support

Price and stock answers while the rep is still in the aisle

Your outside reps email and text the same questions all day: what does this account pay for this SKU, how many are on hand, did Tuesday's order ship. The agent pulls the current contract price, live availability, or tracking number from the ERP and replies in minutes. Inside sales stops being a switchboard and gets back to orders and selling.

quoting

RFQs priced from the customer's actual tier

An inbound request for pricing gets read, matched to the account's tier or contract, checked against stock and lead times, and returned as a drafted quote for your rep to approve and send. The customer shopping three distributors gets your number first, and it's the right number, not a guess from an outdated sheet.

order status

"Where's my order" answered without interrupting anyone

The agent looks up the order in your ERP, pulls tracking from the carrier, and drafts the reply: shipped yesterday, two cartons, here's the tracking link, the third carton follows Friday from the other warehouse. Ship confirmations with tracking go out automatically at end of day, which quietly heads off most of these emails before they're ever sent.

how it works

From audit to agents on the order desk

01
Audit your order-to-cash
We watch how orders actually move through your shop: the inbox where POs land, the retyping into the ERP, the price files, the backorder report, the questions reps ask all day. You leave with a ranked list of which workflows an agent should take first and which should stay human.
02
Install the first agent
Usually order entry, because the volume is high and every result is easy to check against the original PO. We wire it into your ERP and inbox, and every drafted order gets human approval until your team stops finding corrections to make.
03
Run, review, expand
We operate the agents, read the logs, and tune the edge cases: the customer who still orders off a discontinued part number, the vendor whose price file changes format every quarter. When order entry gets boring, we move to the next workflow.

Straight answers

Our costs, pricing, and customer list are the whole business. Who sees them?+

Honest answer: the agents do, and we do while building them. Everything runs inside your systems with scoped credentials you control, and every action is logged so you can audit exactly what was read and what was sent. We sign NDAs, we never share anything between clients, and we configure the AI providers on commercial API terms under which your data is not used to train their models. If your cost file is off-limits, we build around it and the agent works from sell prices only.

We're on an older ERP and plenty of customers still fax their orders. Does that break this?+

No. Email and fax-to-email are exactly the mess these agents are built for, and PDFs, spreadsheets, and scanned order forms are all readable. If your ERP has an API, we use it; if it doesn't, we work with whatever it exposes, up to and including automating the same screens your order entry team uses today. The messier the intake, the more hours there are to recover.

Is this about replacing our inside sales team?+

No. It's about the ratio of orders to people. The agents take the retyping, the lookups, and the routine notifications, and escalate anything that needs judgment: a brand-new account, a pricing dispute, a customer threatening to walk over a slipped backorder. Your team handles more orders and spends more of the day actually selling. Same team, double the output.

What does it cost?+

Engagements start at $5,000 per month, which covers building and operating the agents, not just handing you software. Whether that pencils out depends on your order volume and what your desk hours cost — the free AI audit works that math out with you before you commit to anything. If that budget isn't realistic yet, start with our free resources instead.

Keep going

Data entry automation

How agents turn PDFs, spreadsheets, and emailed order forms into clean records in your system of record.

Inventory sync automation

Keeping stock levels, ETAs, and backorder status consistent across your ERP, storefront, and customer notifications.

Quoting automation

From inbound RFQ to an approved, tier-priced quote without the same-day scramble.

Custom AI agents

What we actually build: software employees that read, decide, act, and escalate.

Find out where your order desk hours actually go

The free AI audit maps your order-to-cash, from the PO landing in the inbox to the ship confirmation going out, and shows you which workflows an agent can take over first. No deck, no fluff, just a ranked list you can act on.

Book your free AI audit

We take on companies ready to invest $5,000+/month. Not there yet? Our free resources are genuinely free.