Smart Quotation, in the agent era.
By Scott Li ·
Notes on plugging an agent into our Smart Quotation workflow: what changed, what we measured, and where the verification step matters.
Our Smart Quotation system has been live with multiple Singapore SMEs since 2018. The product covers customer + product + sales-team management, automated quotation document generation in Excel and PDF, approval workflows, follow-up email automation, SMS notifications, and encrypted backups. The product page lives under /services/.
The interesting story is what happened when we added an agent.
What the agent does
The system generated quotations from templates using product / customer / pricing data. The agent’s narrow job is the prose around the numbers:
- The opening line that fits this customer’s relationship history.
- The line items that need a one-sentence justification.
- The “things to consider” section that varies by industry.
- The follow-up email body, two weeks later, that doesn’t sound like a copy-paste.
The agent reads the customer’s history (CRM-style), the product context, and the past quotations sent to similar customers. It drafts. The salesperson reviews and sends.
What we measured
Three things we tracked over the first six months:
- Time per quotation, salesperson side. Dropped from a median of ~22 minutes (with substantial tail) to ~6 minutes, including review.
- Conversion rate. Slightly up. We are not sure how much is the agent vs other changes.
- Customer feedback on tone. A small qualitative sample (~30 customers) preferred the new prose. The agent is consistent and the salespeople varied.
What we changed after the first month
The agent was over-confident in its first iteration. It’d state pricing assumptions in declarative tone where it should have hedged. We added a hedging-when-uncertain rule and a fact-checker step that compares the agent’s prose to the structured pricing data. If the prose says something the data doesn’t support, the line is flagged for the salesperson before send.
This is the discipline pattern we use everywhere: narrow agent, deterministic verification, human approval. It applies to quotations as much as it applies to industrial agentic AI.
The system, still running. The data flow, still the same. The salesperson’s sign-off, still a human signature.
— Scott Li, wGrow