Automating commercial operations
Commercial operations hide a large amount of invisible work: reading an email, finding a product reference, checking a quantity, creating an order, following up on a quote or routing a request to the right person. AI can now automate part of this work. But not every task is the same, and not every task should be automated in the same way. This section explores the use cases, methods and limits of automation in B2B commercial teams.
OCR or AI: what is the difference when reading a purchase order?
OCR fetches each piece of information from the spot it was taught to look at. An order capture agent understands what is being ordered and finds the right product code in your ERP, even when the customer writes it their own way. Reading is rarely where things go wrong. Matching each line to the right item is.
8 min read
AI or EDI: how do you handle the B2B orders that still arrive by email?
You can have your largest customers connected by EDI and still rekey orders every day. Purchase orders arrive by email, PDFs pile up in the sales admin inbox, spreadsheets still have to be re-entered into the ERP. That is not a failure of EDI. It is simply the flow it does not cover.
4 min read