Why the quote request comes first
Building products are mostly sold by quote, not by cart. A real order depends on configuration, quantity, schedule, freight and terms that a person settles. That makes the quote request the natural first thing to let an AI assistant do.
It has commercial value: it's how most projects start. It's bounded: a request can't spend money, reserve stock or commit a date. And a person is already in the loop, because someone at the company reads every request today.
Ordering, payment, stock holds and substitutions are a different class of action. They need the company's own rules, stronger identity checks and a person approving each one. We're not building those first.
What the request should carry
A good request from an assistant should arrive better prepared than most web forms.
Who it's for: the person's name, company and role, plus an email or phone for the reply. Who sent it: a person, or an AI assistant acting for one. The assistant's name is recorded, but it isn't trusted as identity. Where the project is: city, region or postal code, which is enough to route it. The site address comes later, from a person.
What they need: product IDs from your record, or plain descriptions, with quantities. The requirements, kept exactly as written: if the spec says CW-PG50 and a certain U-factor, that's what the rep sees. When they need it, as a request, not a promised date. What they want back: a quote, the documents, a sample, a rep, an availability answer.
Everything else is refused. If a request includes a field like “accepted price” or “confirm order”, it's rejected, not ignored.
Where it should go
First, the request has to reach the right company. A manufacturer often doesn't quote at all: a rep, a distributor or a dealer covers the region. The quoting party comes from the product's channel record, never by assuming the maker sells direct.
Then, inside that company, it routes by territory and category, in order: a postal-code territory, such as Northeast Ohio's inside sales; a state or region, such as an Ohio territory manager; a product line, such as the insulated panels desk; and finally the company's default inbox.
A request that matches nothing is kept and flagged, never dropped. A misrouted lead can be forwarded. A lost one can't.
What the assistant gets back
A receipt that says exactly what happened: received, routed to a role, a person will follow up. It isn't a quote, a price, a stock confirmation or a delivery date, and the wording is fixed so no assistant can turn it into “your order is confirmed.”
What has to exist before it's switched on
The request format is the easy part. Before any company's quote request can be called by an AI assistant, Lehvel's action layer needs ten things: authentication, authorization, rate limits per caller and per company, human approval, spam protection, idempotency so a retry isn't a second request, input validation, an audit log, replay protection, and a kill switch per company and globally.
The same layer serves car dealerships' inventory inquiries. It's built once.
