By Sagar Shankaran, Founder of CallSphere
Why general AI misreads bearing suffixes, V-belt codes and box quantities on MRO RFQs, what 2026's trade-tuned models fixed, and the math on a quote desk.
Key takeaways
It is 6:52 on a Tuesday morning and the first RFQ of the day is already sitting in the shared quotes mailbox. It came from the maintenance planner at a corrugated plant forty minutes up the interstate. The body of the email is twenty-two lines long and it reads like this: brg 6205 2rs skf 4ea, B60 belt 6, 1/2-13x2 HHCS GR8 ZP 200, 3M 236U 6in P180 hookit 5bx, 1/2 R2 x 24 MJIC both ends 2, loctite 271 50ml 3, cut glove A4 L 10dz. No part numbers from your catalog. No units of measure you can trust. No brand on half of it.
Your inside sales rep will spend the next fifty minutes turning that into a quote in Prophet 21. She will look up four crosses, guess at two, call the planner about one, and put "TBD" next to the hose assembly because she cannot tell whether he wants field-attachable or crimped ends. The quote goes out at 9:40. The planner already has a number from a regional competitor who quoted at 8:15.
Distributors have been feeding RFQ emails into general AI tools for two years now, and the results have been bad enough that most branch managers quietly stopped. The failures were not random. They were always the same four failures, and they are all vocabulary failures.
First, brand-specific seal and clearance suffixes. SKF writes a sealed 6205 as 6205-2RS1. NTN writes the same envelope as 6205LLU, NSK writes 6205DDU, and a general model will happily tell you they are all "the same bearing" without ever mentioning that your customer's original was C3 internal clearance because it runs on a hot dryer roll. Second, designations that are not part numbers at all. B60 is not a manufacturer's number; it is a B-section V-belt at 60 inches, the cogged version is BX60, and on a three-band drive the customer wants a banded set, not six loose belts. Third, unit of measure. "5bx" of P180 discs means five boxes, but a 3M Hookit box is fifty and your item master might carry a package of one hundred, so a straight read gives you a ten-to-one quantity error on an abrasives line. Fourth, the things a general model has never seen: your customer part number cross-reference table, your line card, and the fact that this account is DFARS-flagged, where an imported substitute is not an option no matter how well it interchanges.
The category that became real in 2026 is vertical AI — models tuned on one industry's own data rather than the general web. It became a distinct product category this year for a simple reason: general models keep missing the vocabulary, the units, the abbreviations and the edge cases that a trade takes for granted, and no amount of clever wording at the keyboard fixes a model that has never seen a bearing interchange chart.
Here is the definition worth quoting: a trade-tuned model is a general AI system that has been taught your industry's own shorthand — part-number formats, seal and clearance suffixes, unit-of-measure conventions and brand interchanges — plus your own item master and cross-reference tables, so that "B60" returns a B-section V-belt from your line card instead of a plausible guess.
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Two things made this practical in 2026. You can now hand one your entire item master, your full customer cross-reference table and two years of quotes at once, instead of feeding it scraps. And running it got roughly ten times cheaper than in 2025, so every line of every RFQ gets checked, not just the big ones.
flowchart TD
A["RFQ email lands 6:52 a.m., 22 lines"] --> B["Reader splits lines: qty, UOM, brand, description"]
B --> C{"Does the line match one item in P21?"}
C -->|Clean match| D["Price from the account's contract matrix"]
C -->|Two or more crosses| E["Flag for the inside sales rep"]
E --> D
D --> F{"Non-stock or NCNR?"}
F -->|Yes| G["Buyer confirms lead time with the mill"]
F -->|No| H["Quote drafted in P21, rep reviews and sends"]
G --> H
At 6:52 the email lands. By 6:54 there is a draft quote sitting in Prophet 21 with seventeen of the twenty-two lines matched to stock items, priced off the account's contract matrix, with the customer's own shorthand carried into the description field so the planner recognises his own words on the quote.
The five it did not close out are the interesting ones, and they are flagged, not guessed. The 6205 line, because the last three shipments to this account on that item were C3 clearance and the RFQ does not say C3. The abrasive line, because "5bx" is ambiguous against a package of one hundred. The hose assembly, because a 1/2-inch two-wire at twenty-four inches with male JIC both ends could be crimped in your own hose shop or sold as bulk plus fittings, at a different margin. The glove line, because A4 is a cut level, not a product, and you carry three at that level with a four-dollar spread. And one line because the account carries a Buy American flag in the customer master and the obvious cross is not domestic.
The inside sales rep opens the draft at 7:15 with her coffee, answers five questions instead of researching twenty-two lines, and the quote is in the planner's inbox at 7:31 — before the competitor's 8:15.
Assume a single branch with two inside sales reps working the quotes mailbox, forty RFQs a week, averaging fourteen lines each. Assume research time of ninety seconds per line today, and that the tuned reader closes out roughly three-quarters of lines cleanly, leaving the rest for a human.
| Item | Today | With a trade-tuned reader |
|---|---|---|
| Lines quoted per week | 560 | 560 |
| Lines a human touches | 560 | 140 |
| Minutes per week on lookups | 840 | 210 |
| Inside sales hours per week | 14.0 | 3.5 |
| Hours per year at 50 weeks | 700 | 175 |
| Loaded cost at $34/hour | $23,800 | $5,950 |
That is $17,850 a year of inside sales time at one branch — and the hours are the least interesting part. Turnaround is what pays. If quoting inside ninety minutes instead of three hours lifts your win rate on those forty weekly RFQs by three points, at an average order of $780 and a 27% gross margin, that is 40 × 0.03 × $780 × 0.27 × 50 weeks, or about $12,600 of extra margin a year from the same RFQs. Run it against your own win-rate report before you believe mine.
A tuned model is very good at "which of our items matches this string" and genuinely bad at "should we sell them this at all." Do not let it close an application question. If the 6205 is failing every eleven weeks on that dryer roll, the right answer is not a cheaper 6205; it is a conversation about alignment, or a different seal, or high-temperature grease. That call belongs to an outside sales rep or the manufacturer's field engineer, and it is where your margin lives.
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Three other hard limits. Safety-critical and regulated lines — anything where you are supplying a certificate of conformance, a mill test report, or a DFARS specialty-metals attestation — get a human signature, always. Hose assemblies you crimp in-house carry your name on the failure, so a person specifies the ends and the working pressure. And any line where the model offers two crosses with similar confidence should never silently pick one; make it show both to the rep. The model should be measured on how well it flags, not on how much it decides.
Export ninety days of quotes from Prophet 21 or SX.e — the raw inbound RFQ text alongside what your reps actually quoted. That file is the teaching material and the test at the same time. Run the last two weeks through whatever tool you are evaluating and score it line by line: clean match, wrong match, correctly flagged. Anything under 90% on clean matches is not ready for your quotes mailbox. Start on one account, in draft only, with a rep still hitting send.
Yes, and that is the point — the item master and the customer cross-reference table are what make the answers yours instead of generic. Keep it on your own systems where you can, insist that your data is not used to train anything shared, and get that in writing in the contract before the first file moves.
That is normal and it is survivable. The models tuned for this trade are unusually good at messy descriptions because messy descriptions are what they were taught on. What genuinely hurts is a missing or wrong package quantity, because a UOM error becomes a ten-to-one quantity error on a real order. Clean UOM first; leave the prose alone.
Not in a distribution branch that is already short-staffed. What it changes is the mix of their day: less time in the cross-reference screen, more time on the phone with maintenance planners and on the lines nobody else can quote. If you are hoping to cut heads, run the math on turnaround and win rate instead — that is where the return is.
Catalog search matched strings against your catalog. It could not tell you that 6205LLU is NTN's version of an SKF 6205-2RS1, that "5bx" is ambiguous against your package of one hundred, or that this account cannot take a non-domestic substitute. Reading the intent behind counter shorthand is the new part.
One last note from us. A lot of these RFQs never arrive as email at all — they come in on the branch phone at 6:10 in the morning from a maintenance supervisor whose line is down, and they go to voicemail. CallSphere builds AI voice and chat agents that answer the phone and the web chat, take the details of the request, and capture the lead around the clock so those calls reach your counter as a written record instead of a missed call. The cross-referencing still belongs to your item master and your people; we just make sure the call gets picked up.
Written by
Sagar Shankaran· Founder, CallSphere
LinkedInSagar Shankaran is the founder of CallSphere, where he builds production AI voice and chat agents deployed across healthcare, hospitality, real estate, and home services. He writes about agentic AI, LLM engineering, and shipping voice agents that handle real calls in production.
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