Distribution-focused artificial intelligence platform provider Proton.ai announced the general availability of its Order & Quote Entry Automation system on July 21.

The agentic system is designed to process inbound customer requests — including emails containing competitor part numbers, vague product descriptions, spreadsheets, PDFs and screenshots — and convert them into draft quotes or orders.

Users can also verbally describe a customer’s request to the platform during a phone call or counter interaction. Proton said its AI agents can identify products, verify compatibility and availability, prepare quotes, draft customer emails, follow up on unanswered proposals and recommend substitutes when an item is unavailable.

Sales representatives must approve each quote before it is sent to the customer.

“As long as your people are the glue between systems, the power of AI stays capped,” Proton Founder and CEO Benj Cohen said in the company’s announcement. “The agent that drafts the quote already knows the customer, the catalog and the pricing — so it doesn’t type faster, it does the job.”

The system operates on the same data layer as Proton’s customer relationship management, product information management and eCommerce tools. Proton said that shared architecture allows information collected through one application to improve product matching, catalog enrichment and recommendations elsewhere on the platform.

Building Products Inc., a wholesale building materials distributor serving lumberyards across the Midwest, is among the system’s early customers.

Proton also cited a structured test conducted by a large North American industrial distributor. According to Proton, the platform identified the correct product from description-only lists without human assistance three times as often as the distributor’s internal cross-reference system while reducing list-preparation time by 75%.

The general availability follows Proton’s March introduction of a unified “industry cloud” platform that combines CRM, PIM, eCommerce recommendations and order automation within a shared data environment. At that time, the order and quote entry module remained under development and available through a waitlist.

Proton also recently partnered with distribution sales consultancy Revenue Optics to combine Proton’s AI-generated account and product opportunities with Revenue Optics’ inside-sales processes and coaching. The companies said the partnership was designed to help distributors identify and pursue revenue opportunities within under-covered existing accounts.