Brief sections
The leak
A purchase order lands at 4:12 on a Friday as a PDF attachment with “see attached” in the body. It sits until Monday, gets forwarded twice to find the right person, and is typed into the ERP on Tuesday — if the person who knows the account codes isn’t out. Nothing about this is anyone’s fault: the inbox has no notion of urgency, no idea which message is a five-figure order and which is a newsletter, and no memory of what’s been sitting too long. The result is the pattern we find everywhere — slow response, lost orders, and customers who don’t complain; they just quietly send the next PO somewhere faster.
What AI realistically does here
Triage, not autopilot. The system reads what arrives, classifies it — order, RFQ, question, complaint, noise — extracts the fields that matter (customer, items, quantities, dates), routes it to the right person with a drafted first response, and keeps a clock on everything so nothing ages silently. Order acceptance stays human: the system stages the order for confirmation rather than committing your inventory or your schedule on its own. The aim is to shorten the wait and give the person a filled-in form to review. We measure the actual change against your current process.
What has to be true first
- Intake actually flows through channels a system can see. A shared inbox works; orders arriving mostly by text to the owner’s personal cell is a workflow fix that comes first.
- A place for structured orders to land — ERP, order sheet, even a disciplined spreadsheet. Triage that ends in another inbox has moved the pile, not shrunk it.
- A response norm with a name on it: who owns the queue, and what “too old” means in hours.
What we'd install
Triage is often one of the first leaks worth fixing because the data is already there — the emails exist. It still goes through the same gate as everything else: scored in the opportunity portfolio, the intake workflow redesigned on paper first, the triage agent on the roster with the queue owner’s name next to it, and response time — arrival to first human action — as its line in the value ledger. Sequence and cadence are on the AI operating partnership.
Worth it?
Time-stamp one week of intake: when each order or inquiry arrived, and when a human first acted on it. That gap, against what a day of delay costs you in lost orders and expediting, is the number to test. The calculator below gives an illustrative annual range — illustrative math, not a promise — and the scorecard tells you whether this is your worst leak or merely your most visible one.