We build retrieval assistants for wholesale HVAC parts and equipment distribution. It lives inside your B2B portal, grounded in your catalog, your parts cross-references, your manufacturer specs, your fitment guides, and your ERP. Contractors and your senior reps ask in plain language and get a grounded answer with the source cited, in seconds.
No deck. We build a working agent on a slice of your catalog and show you.
Every answer cites the source document it came from.
Your inside sales and parts staff are the second-busiest function in your business after the warehouse. A typical week:
Your senior parts staff know these answers. They've been pulling parts for years. Your portal doesn't, because it was built for SKU numbers and these questions aren't. So they land on the same three or four desks every day.
Fan motor for a 2009 Trane XR15, OEM or universal?
TRN-FM-0824, OEM Trane fan motor, 1/4 HP, 825 RPM, 208/230V. 6 in stock at your tier. Universal alternative: UNV-FM-0825, 4 in stock, 18% lower cost.
A retrieval assistant makes sense when all three of these are true.
Tens of thousands of SKUs across multiple manufacturers, fitment guides, manufacturer parts catalogs, supersession bulletins, technical service bulletins. The answers are in your documents. Your portal can't surface them.
Fitment, substitutes, in-stock checks at the closest branch, refrigerant capacities, account lookups. Not the "find SKU 4827" type that keyword search handles. The kind that need interpretation, comparison, or context to answer. The questions land on your senior parts staff, who answer them instead of selling.
Service contractors come to it daily to find parts, place orders, and check stock. When it can't help them, they call your team or shop somewhere else.
The assistant doesn't invent product data. SKU lookups are deterministic database queries against your live catalog, not LLM guesses. If a SKU recommendation is part of an answer, it gets validated against the live catalog before it shows up. Invalid SKUs get stripped. For document retrieval like spec sheets or installation manuals, a confidence threshold decides whether the answer is solid enough to return. When nothing meets the bar, the assistant says it doesn't have a definitive answer instead of guessing.
No. The assistant works with your existing portal and your existing ERP. It reads from the catalog, the order data, and the documents you already have. Most distributor systems have documented APIs that integrate cleanly. Custom or legacy setups take more work but are usually doable. Nothing gets replaced.
We work with one industry. Wholesale distribution. The audit call is fifteen minutes, and we use it to walk through your catalog, your portal, and the questions your team is fielding all day. By the end of it, you'll know whether retrieval makes sense for your business.
If we're a fit, we'll build a working agent against a slice of your catalog before any contract conversation. You see the system answering real contractor questions about your products. Then you decide.
Fifteen minutes. We'll walk your catalog and tell you whether this fits.
Book a call or email hello@retrieva.co