Every planning that includes a quote process calculates with a turnaround time that was established somewhere: so many weeks for drafting, so many days for internal approval, so much back-and-forth with the client. That norm did not come out of nowhere. It is the sum of human steps: someone looks up comparable earlier quotes, someone works through the calculation, someone writes the text, someone checks it, someone sends it. That sum held true for years, because every step actually had to be done by a person, and that person had other things to do as well.
The assumption was therefore not careless. It was a reasonable translation of a process that indeed took as long as it took. Planning, capacity estimates, and sometimes even the promise to the client about delivery time were built on that duration.
What has shifted is not the process but its staffing. Parts of a quote process are exactly the kind of work that can be taken over: retrieving structured information, searching earlier quotes for comparable situations, drawing up an initial calculation based on fixed rules, formulating a draft letter. That is not a future prospect; it is already happening today at companies that have dared to treat these steps as separate tasks instead of one indivisible process.
Other parts remain where they were. A pricing arrangement that deviates from the norm, an assessment of what is currently driving this specific client, the decision whether or not to factor in a risk: that remains human work, with someone who approves or rejects it and can explain why. The difference between companies that already see their turnaround time falling and companies where it remains unchanged rarely lies in the sector. It lies in whether someone has broken the quote process open into tasks, or has kept treating it as one block that could not be changed.
The first place where it becomes visible is not the turnaround time itself but the gap between what is planned and what actually happens. A quote process that on paper takes three weeks, but where the draft version is ready within days and the delay from now on sits in the approval round, is a signal that the norm still dates from the old phase.
A second signal is divergence between departments or locations that have started handling the same process differently. If one branch of the company already works with a pre-processed draft quote and the other does not, then the shared norm has in fact become two norms without anyone having recorded that.
A third signal is that the client expects something different from what the planning promises. When competitors respond faster because they have already sped up their preliminary process, one's own turnaround time becomes a competitive disadvantage that does not stem from worse people, but from a slower process. That touches the same mechanism as the assumption that scale offers protection: an advantage that once held automatically no longer does so automatically.
This is not an argument for cutting positions in the quote process. What an employer does with the freed-up time or capacity is a decision with its own legal requirements, and those should not be treated here as a checkbox on a strategy document. What does belong here is the question of whether the planning norm still matches what actually happens, separate from what happens with the freed-up hours.
Nor is it a guarantee that AI will make the process faster. Whether a quote process becomes shorter depends on how many of the tasks within it can be structured, how much oversight remains necessary, and how the company connects those two. That differs per organization and per type of quote, and cannot be captured in a single percentage.
An assumption about turnaround time remains testable when it is broken down into the steps it is built from, not when it remains a single number. Useful measurements are: the time between request and first draft version, the time between draft version and internal approval, and the time between approval and sending to the client. Anyone who tracks these three separately sees exactly where the shift has already taken place and where the old norm is still intact.
A second measurement is the share of quotes where the draft version goes to the client without revision versus the share where internal adjustments are still made. That difference shows how much of the process now runs on oversight rather than on fully manual work.
The underlying question of which part of the quote-process tasks in this specific company can genuinely be taken over by AI is answered per task with the work scan from FTE TO AI, separate from the question of what you decide to do with that outcome.
What you can do now is not overhaul the entire process but set one assumption apart: the norm on which your planning and your client promise are built. A free assumption check is a short session in which you name your most important assumptions and see, per assumption, when it was last confirmed. For those who want to place this alongside other assumptions that are shifting, such as those about telephone customer contact or about the difference between a strategy and a plan, the full strategic proofing is under construction.
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Answers come from this site’s knowledge base. Not tailored advice, and not a scan of your company.