We delivered an AI account coordinator for a North Charleston equipment distributor whose six outside reps sell to hospitality groups — one that captures every face-to-face call on a wearable recorder, shapes it into the right template for that call type, writes the commitments back to the CRM with owners and due dates, and drafts the follow-up before the rep leaves the parking lot.

The company has sold commercial kitchen equipment out of a warehouse in North Charleston since 1978, and for most of that time the record of what a customer wanted lived in a spiral notebook on the passenger seat of a truck. There are six outside reps now, each with an assigned book, and between them they cover about three hundred and forty active accounts — hospitality groups, mostly, the kind that run four to eleven concepts across the peninsula and Mount Pleasant, plus two hotel management companies. A rep makes five to seven face-to-face calls a day. In a single visit he might spec a combi oven, get pulled into a walk-in that has been running warm for a week, hear that the group is signing a lease on Daniel Island, and take a complaint about a delivery that arrived on the wrong day.

Four different things, four different owners inside the company, one rep in a hot kitchen with a phone in his hand. The sales manager pulled the numbers before he called us. Of roughly eleven hundred logged calls in a quarter, four in ten carried notes shorter than twenty words. "Good meeting, follow up" was a common entry.

When a rep left in January, his thirty-eight accounts came back to the company as a list of names and a stack of open quotes nobody could explain. And the commitments — check the lead time on two ovens, get service out Thursday, resend the quote with the stand included — were living in memory. Some got done. The ones that did not surfaced six weeks later as a group buying somewhere else.

What we built starts with hardware. All six reps carry a Plaud Pro. They announce it at the top of every call and ask; South Carolina is a one-party consent state, but the client's rule is that nobody gets recorded without being told, and the reps were trained to say it in one sentence and move on. From there it is templates and plumbing.

We wrote four call templates — new-account discovery, spec and quote, service escalation, quarterly business review — and the system picks the one that fits from the account record and the calendar entry. Each produces structured output rather than a wall of prose: who was in the room, equipment discussed down to model number and quantity, prices quoted, delivery windows promised, objections raised in the customer's own words, and a commitments list with an owner and a date attached to every line. That output does not sit in an app waiting to be copied. An MCP integration writes it into the CRM against the correct account and contact, opens tasks for the commitments, and routes service items to the service desk rather than the rep's inbox.

A second integration reads the ERP, so when a rep discusses an item the summary already knows there is a fourteen-week lead time on it and says so in the recap, which is a conversation better had on Tuesday than in October. Then it drafts the follow-up email in that rep's voice, sitting in his drafts before he pulls out of the lot. We ran three group training sessions at the warehouse, then worked each rep individually until the templates matched how he actually sells. That part does not end.

All six have standing office hours at the Lab on Jessen Lane, scheduled individually, face-to-face, where they bring whatever is not working. One rep comes almost every week. One has been twice. Both patterns are fine, and the second rep's two visits produced the change to the service escalation template that everybody now uses.

Four months in, every call carries a real record instead of six in ten. Administrative time per rep fell from about fifty minutes a day to nine. Eight hundred and twelve commitments were tracked in the first full quarter and ninety-four percent closed inside the promised window, a number that simply did not exist before. Quotes that used to take three days go out the same afternoon.

And when a rep did leave in June, his successor picked up forty-one accounts with the history intact. "I used to ask my guys what happened on a call," the sales manager said. "Now I ask them what they want to do about it."