PROPOSED AI APPLICATION

Hardware catalogue assistant

Staff search technical product sheets manually

Hardware and building material storesKnowledge and workflow pilotProposed solution scope

The problem and the proposed outcome

Application: Hardware and building material stores — Hardware catalogue assistant
Problem to solve: Staff search technical product sheets manually
Target buyer: Hardware dealers, building material traders
Intended use: Employee / expert own workflow; internal business solution
Benefit to test: Test whether evidence lookup and response preparation become faster while correctness remains acceptable.
Potential delivery: Internal application, reviewer dashboard, private assistant or authorized user portal; choose one surface after validating the workflow.

AI method: Evidence-grounded knowledge assistant / RAG
Method code: R
AI contribution: Use semantic retrieval and a language model to answer from approved sources, attach source references, and abstain when evidence is missing.
Output artifact: Answer draft with supporting source passages and an unresolved-question flag.
Core modules: Approved source intake → semantic retrieval → evidence-linked answer → reviewer feedback
Simple baseline: Manual document search, curated FAQ and keyword search.
Why test AI: Could help with semantically varied questions over many documents; retain the baseline if AI does not improve usefulness or handling time.

Pilot track: Knowledge and workflow pilot
Required data: Approved product sheets; stock records
Data readiness: A current approved corpus, access rules and representative questions with reviewer-approved answers are needed.
First development step: Select an approved corpus and create a small reviewer-labelled question set; measure keyword/FAQ performance first.
Initial MVP scope: One defined task, one permitted dataset and one reviewer workflow. Manual upload or authorized export first; no unattended external action. Validate the model before live integration.
Demo data: Synthetic or licensed public samples may illustrate the workflow. Real benefit and model performance need representative authorized held-out data.
Buyer validation question: Ask Hardware dealers, building material traders: show a recent case where staff search technical product sheets manually, record the present effort or error, and confirm whether the required data can lawfully be used.

Primary success metric: Specification lookup time
Model evaluation: Measure answer correctness, grounding, source relevance, abstention and unauthorized-source exclusion on held-out questions.
Metric target: Set after baseline measurement; no improvement or accuracy result asserted.

Specialist review: No special flag; domain review still applies
Human review boundary: Authorized user reviews critical facts, output quality and access before publishing, importing or acting.
Domain review: Confirm data ownership, access, source rights, reviewer authority and correction routes with the operator.
Related micro-ERP catalogue IDs: IWA-B-5109C15B8D85; IWA-B-EABC08644023; IWA-B-8BEEDF675F60
Integration status: Potential segment link only; no product integration implemented.