Carlos EscasainCommercial Systems & Process Architect
ENES

RA / 02

AI-assisted RFQ processing

A human-controlled path from unstructured email to a reviewable commercial record draft.

Reference pattern7 minUpdated 27 Sep 2026
Reference pattern

Independently created. Contains no employer or client implementation detail, internal names or figures.

01Purpose

A pattern to adapt, not a blueprint to copy.

This reference architecture makes responsibility and handoffs visible before technology selection. It assumes a multi-system commercial environment where user experience, operational recovery and analytical consistency all matter.

02Logical flow

  1. 01Incoming email
  2. 02Classification
  3. 03Extraction
  4. 04Matching
  5. 05Human review
  6. 06CRM commit

03The agent design

Authority, tools, review and evaluation—designed per step.

The flow above becomes an agent only when every step has an actor, a tool contract, an authority level and an evaluation dimension. Drafts are reversible; commits pass through a person; the tools enforce it.

AI & Agentic Workflows · flagship caseDesigning an AI-assisted RFQ intake agent

04Design rules

  1. 01
    Authority

    Name the owner of every write, status transition and identifier.

  2. 02
    Boundaries

    Exchange stable contracts; do not reproduce one system’s internal model everywhere.

  3. 03
    Recovery

    Give failed work an owner, an observable state and a safe replay path.

  4. 04
    Human control

    Place review where ambiguity becomes consequential—not at every step.

Reference noteThe boxes are the easy part. The architecture lives in the contracts, ownership and behavior between them.