The comparison the agent returns: three suppliers on the same line item, with price, variance, lead time and payment terms — and one awarded. This is the output, not the interface.
A procurement agent for construction firms: it reads the bill of quantities, identifies every material, emails the suppliers, chases the ones who go quiet and consolidates the replies into a comparison ready to decide on.
The comparison the agent returns: three suppliers on the same line item, with price, variance, lead time and payment terms — and one awarded. This is the output, not the interface.
KONBUD is our own product: the landing page, the application and the agents that drive it were all built by us, end to end. There is a live pilot running on a project under construction.
Buying materials for a construction project is chasing people. Hundreds of line items, dozens of suppliers, each replying by email whenever it suits them — or not replying at all. A site manager spends five hours a week just chasing quotes and typing them into a spreadsheet to be able to compare them.
An agent that does that work on its own. It reads the bill of quantities, extracts every material with AI, sends the requests, reads the replies as they arrive by email, chases whoever stays quiet and assembles the comparison. The human comes in only at the end: to award.
Four steps. None of them needs anyone sitting there.
The bill of quantities goes in exactly as the contractor hands it over. No templates, no prior formatting.
The model identifies every material with its quantity and unit. In the pilot: 430 items across 13 trade categories.
The agent emails the suppliers and follows up on its own: it chases whoever stays quiet, with nobody pushing it.
It reads the replies coming in, normalises them and builds the comparison with price, variance, lead time and payment terms.
Anyone can automate sending emails. What makes KONBUD an agent is the loop: it watches who has not replied and writes to them again, day after day, until the line item is quoted.
Replies arrive however they arrive: a price in the body of the email, an attachment, a counter-offer. The agent parses them and turns them into comparable rows of the same table.
Every offer is compared against the reference price in the bill of quantities. Anything out of range flags itself, so nobody signs off an overspend without seeing it.
How long a quote round to 12 suppliers on the same line item takes: by hand, against the agent.
Figures from the project the agent is managing right now, not projections.
13 trade categories covered · 92 live variance alerts · agent in operation less than 48 hours after the demo
If someone in your company spends the day chasing replies and tidying them into a spreadsheet, that is an agent waiting to be built. It does not matter that you are not in construction: the pattern is the same.