What Are the Best AI Solutions for Manufacturing?

Where Should Manufacturers Start With AI?

On the flip side, the most successful AI projects often begin by identifying a time-consuming task that employees perform dozens or even hundreds of times each week and looking for a way to lessen its burden. These jobs are often rule-based and don’t require complex decision-making, so they’re ideal for AI agents.

John Fazzio took this approach when his company first got involved with AI. Instead of trying to automate an entire department, Pilot Precision focused on customer service calls from distributors requesting pricing and inventory availability, which was a bottleneck within the company.

These calls were necessary, but they took up hours of the customer service team’s day and forced them to answer the same questions over and over again.

Pilot Precision didn’t want to replace the entire customer service team, though, so they built an AI agent that connects directly to the company’s ERP system. The agent, which is a chatbot on the company’s website, can:

• Verify the customer
• Retrieve customer-specific pricing
• Check live inventory levels
• Answer routine pricing and availability requests

If the request falls outside the agent’s capabilities or something doesn’t look right, the conversation is handed off to a team member for review.

“My preference is that AI agents shouldn’t be asked to think too much,” notes Fazzio. “You want to give them specific tasks. ‘This is what I need you to do,’ and then just have them do it over and over and over.”

The results came quickly for Pilot Precision, too, as within a few months, the AI agent was handling approximately 40 to 50 customer inquiries each day, allowing the customer service team to spend more time helping customers solve complex problems.

According to Fazzio, “the ROI for that agent was recouped in less than two months,” while costing only fractions of a cent per interaction to operate.

How Can AI Help Manufacturing Sales Teams?

Automation is often the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of AI for industrial distributors and manufacturers, but one of its biggest benefits is helping sales teams become more productive.

According to Salesforce, sales representatives spend 70% of their time handling administrative work instead of selling. They could spend hours looking up product information and checking inventory, giving them less time to build relationships with distributors and end users.

AI can eliminate many of these recurring activities for the sales team. For example, these tools can look up product information and retrieve pricing and inventory data in an instant, so employees don’t have to do it.

This technology also provides an advantage for manufacturers that rely on distributors. When distributors can quickly access inventory and product information, they’ll find it easier to serve their own customers. This is where supply chain and AI intersect: Giving distributors real-time access to the data they need keeps orders moving without extra calls or emails back to the manufacturer.

The result is better responsiveness without sacrificing the personal relationships that truly matter in manufacturing sales.

What Other Business Processes Can AI Improve?

Beyond customer service, AI can also streamline accounting workflows like accounts receivable, accounts payable, and order entry. Pilot Precision didn’t stop after customer service: The company saw so much success with its initial AI investment that it took the technology even further, starting in the accounting department.

Accounts Receivable

Every day, customers would email remittance advice to Pilot Precision after paying invoices by ACH. The problem was that an employee had to review the email, locate the invoices in the ERP system, apply the payments, and enter the information manually to process these payments.

Today, an AI agent performs most of that work without human intervention. This agent:

• Monitors the accounts receivable inbox
• Identifies payment emails
• Extracts invoice numbers and payment amounts
• Verifies the information against Pilot Precision’s ERP system
• Creates a cash receipt entry for review

The transaction is also flagged for human review if something doesn’t match.

According to Fazzio, the agent now processes roughly 93% of cash receipts without manual intervention. Pilot Precision didn’t let the employees who handled this job go, though, as the company reassigned them to more valuable work within the organization.

“We don’t want AI replacing anybody,” says Fazzio, “but what it’s really done is allowed my accountants to have more time to work on value-added exercises and not just simply adding cash receipts to the system.”

Accounts Payable

Pilot Precision applied the same philosophy to accounts payable, as the company’s newest AI agent:

• Reviews incoming invoices
• Determines whether they’re tied to purchase orders
• Performs three-way matching against purchase orders and receiving records
• Prepares invoices for approval

The agent also uses a growing knowledge base to apply the appropriate accounting rules based on previous transactions when specific invoices aren’t linked to purchase orders.

Order Entry

Pilot Precision’s next AI project focuses on order entry, which is another manual job for manufacturers. The company receives most customer purchase orders by email, and Fazzio notes that today’s AI models are capable of reading those documents and entering orders into the ERP system far more efficiently than traditional optical character recognition (OCR) systems could just a few years ago.

How Should Manufacturers Think About AI as a Business Tool?

At Durrie Sales, we help manufacturers identify opportunities to grow their business through stronger sales strategies and practical business improvements.