An enquiry arrives as an email, a spreadsheet or a photo of a page. Our AI reads it, matches every line to the account’s own catalogue and labour rates, and returns a quote priced for that customer.
Every construction business has a number that limits its growth: how many enquiries it can price. An enquiry might arrive as a paragraph in an email, a spreadsheet, or a photographed page from a specification, and an experienced estimator has to read it, work out what the catalogue calls each item, apply the right discount for that customer, price the labour, and lay it all out as a document worth sending.
That takes around an hour per enquiry, and it competes with live jobs for the same people’s time. Enquiries that wait are enquiries lost, and the ones declined for lack of time never appear in any report.
Agency AI has worked with APSIS Business Components, a construction software platform, for more than a year, building our AI capability into it. Quoting is one of ten capabilities now live, and it takes an enquiry all the way from arrival to a priced, issued document.
An enquiry enters as an email body or an uploaded file. Our AI reads it and pulls out the lines being asked for, each with its description, quantity, unit, and any brand or specification hint the sender gave. From there each line is matched against the account's own catalogue and its own labour rates, scored and ranked, so the estimator sees the best matches rather than a search box. Customer-specific supplier discounts apply automatically, labour is priced from productivity rates rather than guessed, and the result is a quote that can be revised, snapshotted and issued as a PDF.
The enquiry is read, whatever shape it is in. An email body, a spreadsheet, a photographed page. What comes out is a set of lines, each with the description as written, the quantity, the unit, and any brand or specification the sender mentioned in passing.
Nobody writes descriptions the way the catalogue does. A request for "100mm blocks, 7N" has to become a specific catalogue line with a real code and a real price. The system proposes candidates from the account's own catalogue, each scored and ranked, and the estimator confirms rather than searches. That is the difference between assisting an estimator and replacing their judgement, and it is deliberate.
Labour is priced, not guessed. Labour rates carry productivity per day and a task factor. So the labour on a line is worked out from real evidence, not added as a percentage at the end.
The price depends on who is asking. Customer-specific supplier discounts apply automatically, so the number that comes out is the number for that customer, not a list price somebody then has to adjust.
Every issue is a revision. Quotes are lettered, with the totals and the lines snapshotted at the moment of issue and the document stored. When a client says "your quote said", there is a record of exactly what it said.
A quote answers one enquiry. A bill of quantities prices a whole job, and its structure has to hold up under scrutiny from a quantity surveyor.
The estimating side of the platform models that properly rather than approximating it in a spreadsheet. A bill holds items, and an item holds subitems, so a single measured line can carry its own build-up. Each subitem sits against a trade and a category, and prices separately for labour, material, plant and subcontractor, with subcontractor uplift handled as its own rate rather than folded into a margin. Quantities can be overridden where the measure and the reality differ, and the override is visible rather than silently replacing the number underneath.
Above all of that sit the project measures a developer actually asks about: gross external area, gross internal area, net internal area, and the number of units. So the same bill answers both questions, what the work costs and what it costs per square metre, without anyone rebuilding it in a second spreadsheet.
Bills can be issued as a platform standard, so a business prices in a consistent structure across every job instead of each estimator inventing their own layout.
Quoting sits alongside procurement document processing, drawing and schedule extraction, specification comparison, contract risk analysis, bid writing and document search, all built by Agency AI inside the same platform. They share the same accounts, permissions, document handling and audit trail, so each new capability ships faster than the last, and a drawing extracted in one module can be questioned in another.
Read how we build the AI inside the platform →, or see what the same approach does with procurement paperwork.
Our AI does not replace the estimator. It clears the matching and the arithmetic, so the same team answers more enquiries, sooner, and the judgement they are paid for goes on the lines that need it. In a market where the first quote back is usually the one that gets discussed, speed of response is a commercial advantage in its own right.
Tell us where your team loses the most time. We will tell you honestly whether AI pays there, what it takes to build, and what we have already delivered for businesses like yours.
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