What AI cannot do for your quotations, and what it can
Quoting is the process every SME wants to automate first. It is also the one where automation goes wrong most expensively.
Ask a Swiss SME owner which process they would most like to speed up and a large share say quotations. It is slow, it happens under time pressure, and the person who does it well is usually the person with the least time.
It is also the worst possible first automation project, and it is worth being precise about why.
What a quotation actually contains
Four different things, and only two of them are text.
Boilerplate. Company details, terms, validity, standard clauses. Pure repetition.
Scope description. What you will do, phrased for this customer. Text, but text that commits you.
Pricing. A number that depends on your costs, your capacity this month, what you know about this customer, and what you suspect a competitor will charge.
Risk judgement. Whether to quote at all, what to exclude, where to put a caveat. Almost never written down anywhere.
Where a model helps, and where it must not
It is genuinely good at the first two. Assembling boilerplate, adapting a scope description from a similar past job, producing a clean German, French and Italian version of the same document — that is hours per week in a firm that quotes regularly.
It must not produce the third. A model given past quotations will happily infer a price, and that price will look reasonable and be arrived at by pattern rather than by cost. The moment a generated figure reaches a customer, you are bound by it, and the vendor of your software is not.
It cannot do the fourth at all, because the inputs live in a conversation you had at a site visit.
The shape that works
Let the system assemble everything except the numbers, leave the price fields empty and clearly marked, and have the quotation refuse to generate as a final document until a person has filled and confirmed them.
That is not a limitation you are working around. It is the design. The output saves real time on the eighty per cent that is assembly, and it keeps the twenty per cent that creates obligations exactly where it belongs.