Sector · Trade & Wholesale
AI solutions for wholesale & trade
Bonsai builds AI solutions for wholesale and B2B trade that speed up the commercial process, from quote through to stock. AI that knows your catalogue, your price agreements and your margins, connected to the ERP you already run.
What's at play in trade & wholesale
In wholesale you earn on the gap between purchase and sale, on large volume and thin margins. A few percentage points of margin leakage or one missed volume tier shows up straight away. Yet building a quote still means looking up prices, recalculating volume tiers and phoning around for product knowledge: days of work for something that ought to take minutes.
Stock is working capital tied up: customers want short lead times, while every euro of stock risks turning into dead stock. What you know about products, prices and customers is scattered across ERP, PIM, spreadsheets and the heads of your best salespeople, who are ageing. The pain rarely sits in the ERP itself; it sits in the manual work around it.
Meanwhile your customers' buying behaviour is going digital at two speeds. Large retail and construction customers order via EDI and expect flawless order confirmations and delivery notes; the rest email a PDF or pick up the phone. Both flows have to land in the same ERP, and it's the unstructured flow that really sets how many people your back office needs.
Systems we know and connect to
Where it pinches
Quotes take days
Quotes and calculations take days, lost to manual look-up and sums. A slow quote is a lost order.
Order entry is manual work
Orders arrive unstructured (email, PDF, phone) and are keyed into the ERP by hand.
Product knowledge sits in heads
Specifications, alternatives and 'what goes with this' live with a handful of senior salespeople. The day they leave, that knowledge walks out with them.
Stock on gut feeling
With no integrated forecasting, purchasing runs on gut feel, and dead stock and stock-outs follow.
Where AI does help, and where it doesn't
What we build for this
Quote automation
From a request, the products are identified, the prices, volume tiers and terms are pulled in and a draft quote is put forward, in minutes rather than days.
Automate order entry
Unstructured orders are read, matched on item number, and the order screen comes back pre-filled.
Demand forecasting
ML across sales, season and lead times gives you better reorder points and safety stock: less dead stock, higher service level.
Catalogue and sales assistant
AI on your PIM that answers product questions and captures what your best salespeople know, then makes it available to everyone.
Where AI is not the answer
- Your ERP stays where it is; we automate the work around it.
- Dirty item and price data give you unreliable output. Clean master data comes first.
- Hard pricing, VAT and Peppol logic belongs in deterministic rules; a generative model is the wrong place for it.
What we deploy for this
Quote
From request to quote in minutes: a sales agent that knows your product catalogue, your volume tiers and your terms. Priced per quote.
View QuoteBonsai AI Workers
Digital colleagues that read orders, pre-fill the order screens and answer product questions straight from your own data.
View Bonsai AI WorkersDottle
Document AI for incoming orders, order confirmations and invoices, all matched on item number and terms.
View DottleYou can read how we approach it, from discovery through to an SLA, in how we work.
Questions about AI in trade & wholesale
Which AI solutions are there for wholesalers?+
In wholesale it usually comes down to four applications: quote automation (from request to draft quote with your prices and volume tiers), automatic order entry (orders from email and PDF straight into the order screen), demand forecasting (reorder points and safety stock based on sales, season and lead times) and a catalogue and sales assistant that answers product questions from your own data. They all connect to the ERP you already have, so nothing needs replacing.
Can I use AI to look up my sales, margin and stock per sales channel?+
Yes, as long as that data sits in your ERP, webshop or marketplace integration. An AI Worker connects to those systems and answers questions in plain language, such as 'what was the margin on this product group through the webshop last month?' or 'which items will run out of stock this month?'. The figures come straight from your own systems and are calculated with fixed rules, not estimated by a language model. The precondition is that item, price and channel data are properly recorded; otherwise the work starts with cleaning it up.
Does the AI work with my own catalogue and price agreements?+
Yes. We connect the AI to your catalogue, your price agreements and your calculation rules, so the output matches the way you actually sell.
Is this a chatbot?+
No. These are AI workers that get things done: they prepare quotes, look up data and process it in your systems, rather than only holding a conversation.
Do we need to do anything about e-invoicing and Peppol?+
For invoicing to government, e-invoicing is already mandatory. From 1 July 2030 it applies EU-wide for cross-border B2B, and Belgium has required it for domestic B2B since 1 January 2026. If you supply Belgian customers, you need to be Peppol-ready now.
Does this work with Exact, AFAS or SAP Business One?+
Yes. We connect to your existing ERP rather than replacing it.
What if our item and price data is not in order?+
Then we'll tell you straight and start there. AI on dirty master data produces unreliable quotes and orders, so sometimes structuring and cleaning up your catalogue is the first step, and the one that pays back most.
How quickly is quote automation live?+
We work in fixed phases, with a go or no-go decision at each one. A working first result is typically in production within a quarter, usually on a single product group or customer segment, and we expand from there.
Get started
Curious what AI in trade & wholesale does for you?
Further reading
- AI solutions for wholesalers: four bottlenecks
- Making quotes with AI: ChatGPT, quoting software or CPQ?
- Automating quotes in wholesale: from days to minutes
- Building a customer portal for wholesale: three choices that make or break it
- Automating Inventory Management in Wholesale
- Pricing pressure in wholesale: a margin and data problem