The problem, with a number on it
A 40-person machine shop was taking 4.2 days on average to get a first quote back to a customer. Every day of that lag was a live deal cooling off — and their estimators were the bottleneck, not the machines.
What we shipped
A quoting copilot that reads the incoming RFQ, pulls comparable jobs from five years of history, and drafts a priced quote for an estimator to approve. The estimator stays in the loop; the blank-page work disappears.
The result
First week live, time-to-first-quote dropped from 4.2 days to under 12 hours — a measured number from their own CRM, not a projection. Win-rate follow-up is still being tracked, but the sales team stopped losing deals to "we never heard back."
The point was never the model. It was finding the one workflow where speed converts directly into revenue.