Parts for insurers: the first quote wins

When an insurer needs to repair a crashed car, the adjuster takes photos and puts together an order with everything that needs replacing: front right headlight, bumper, fender and a list of brackets and clips. The insurer sends that order to several parts suppliers in the area at the same time.

The first one to send back a complete quote, with the right part, the price and the stock, wins. The others find out they lost after the job has already been awarded.

Why quoting takes so long

The hard part is knowing which part fits. Model, trim, year and equipment all change the part, and two cars that look the same from the outside can take different headlights. On top of that, adjusters write the way they talk, and someone has to translate "the bracket under the bumper" into the exact part number.

That's why training a good quoter takes months. Even with experience, the work goes part by part, searching several systems at once. When several orders come in together, or one with dozens of parts, a queue builds up, and the orders left waiting go to another supplier.

What changes with an AI agent

An AI agent connected to the supplier's catalog and stock reads the order as soon as it arrives, even when it uses informal names. It cross-checks model, trim and equipment to find the right variant, and returns the price, stock and warehouse for each part. Because it searches all the parts in parallel, and several orders at once, the quote is ready for review in minutes.

The team audits what the agent put together, corrects it if needed, adjusts it with commercial judgment and approves it. Without the manual search, the same people can answer many more quotes per day.

For years this search was too complex to automate, so every parts supplier competed with the same thing: experienced people and many hours spent in catalogs. Now the first supplier in the area that quotes in minutes with an agent will start winning orders that are split among several today, and insurers, like any customer, go back first to whoever solves things fast.

A good starting point is to look at how many quote requests you get per day, how many you manage to answer and how many you lost because someone else answered first.

At Laburen we implement AI agents for parts departments with Forward Deployed Engineers who train them on your catalog and connect them to your stock, with human review on every quote.