AI agents for everything around the machines.

The jobs AI agents can take

A shop's office runs on the same few jobs every day: reading drawings, keying orders, moving the schedule, chasing suppliers and filling in quality records. Each is a good job for an AI agent, because the steps are known and a person can check the result. In our setup an agent has a role, the tools it may use, a schedule, rules it never breaks and a person who approves its work.

Quoting from drawings and spec sheets

An RFQ arrives by email with a PDF drawing and a material spec. The Quote Desk agent files it under the customer, reads the drawing and spec sheet (part, material, thickness, quantity, finish, revision), finds the closest past jobs in your ERP with their actual costs, and drafts the quote lines from your rates for material, cutting, forming, welding, machining and finishing. Your estimator corrects and approves the price. The agent sends the approved quote from the estimator's mailbox and follows up on the date you set.

Order entry from email and phone into the ERP

Purchase orders arrive as PDFs, email text and phone calls. The Order Entry agent reads each one, matches the customer, part numbers and revisions, checks prices and requested dates against the quote and your lead times, and builds the sales order in your ERP. If anything does not match, such as an old revision, a price that differs from the quote or a date you cannot make, it holds the order and asks your customer service lead. Once approved, it sends the order acknowledgement.

Production scheduling updates

The Schedule Keeper watches new orders, material receipts, machine downtime and jobs running late. It proposes changes to the schedule with the reason for each one, and your production manager approves them. Then it updates promised dates in the ERP and drafts a note to each customer whose date moved.

Supplier follow-up

Every morning the Supplier Chaser goes through open purchase orders: confirmations not received, ship dates coming up, material that is late. It emails suppliers for a confirmation or a new date, updates expected dates in the ERP and puts the risky ones at the top of your buyer's list. It never places, changes or cancels a purchase order. That stays with the buyer.

Quality and compliance paperwork

Customers want a paperwork pack with each shipment: certificates of conformance, material certs, inspection results, lot and heat numbers. Food processors keep daily food safety, sanitation and batch records. The Quality Records Clerk gathers each record from where it lives, checks it is complete and matches the order or batch, flags gaps the same day and builds the pack. Your quality manager signs off before anything goes to a customer or an auditor.

After-hours phone and dealer questions

Dealers and customers call after your office closes, and many questions are about order status, parts availability or a document they need. An after-hours voice agent answers from your ERP, sends documents by email, logs every call and reaches your on-call person only for a real emergency. It can speak English, Punjabi, Hindi, Mandarin, Korean, French or Filipino.

How a person stays in charge

• Approval before anything goes out or is paid. Quotes, order acknowledgements, customer date changes and supplier emails wait for a yes from the person who owns that job.
• Access limited to the job. The Quote Desk can read past jobs and your rates, but it cannot change prices in the ERP. The Supplier Chaser can update expected dates, but it cannot touch a purchase order's quantity or price.
• A log of every action. What the agent read, what it wrote and who approved it, with the time, so your team can check any quote or order later.
• Rules it never breaks. Each agent has written rules, for example "never sends a price an estimator has not approved".
• A regular self-check. We run our own company on 35 AI employees, and an AI we call the Inspector checks every one of them every 30 minutes. Your agents get a scheduled check of their own, with a person told when something is off.

See how we build for the full setup: phases, guardrails, data handling and the documents you receive.

A worked example

Example only, with round numbers. A 60-person fabrication shop gets about 30 requests for quotes a week by email, each with a PDF drawing and a material spec. One estimator spends most of the day reading drawings and looking up similar jobs before any pricing starts.

The estimator's time moves from reading and looking up to checking and pricing. Before you commit to the build, we test the agent on a set of your past quotes and measure how often its draft needed correcting, so you decide on real numbers from your own shop.

Paying for it: the 0% AI loan

Manufacturing and robotics, and agriculture, are among the priority sectors of the federal Regional Artificial Intelligence Initiative. It lends up to half of an eligible custom AI project's costs, interest-free, through each region's agency. It is a loan, not a grant, and the agency decides. Our AI funding page explains the amounts, deadlines and smallest project size for BC, southern Ontario and the Prairies, with a worked example.

How we start

Book a free 30-minute call with Gurleen. Bring one job: quoting, order entry, scheduling, supplier follow-up or quality records. You leave with a one-page plan: what gets built, what it connects to, who approves what, and whether it fits the 0% AI loan. If you go ahead, we start with a readiness assessment, then build and test on your past jobs before anything touches a live order. Your team learns to run it in hands-on training, and the phone side runs on our AI voice agents.