Automation · CURA Team · 2026-07-15
AI for MRO: Fixing Quoting and AOG Response First
If you run an MRO or parts business, the fastest AI wins are quote turnaround and AOG response. Here is how both are built and what changes commercially.
Ask an MRO where they lose work and you will rarely hear price. You will hear speed. The customer sent the RFQ to four shops and took the first credible quote back. Meanwhile the RFQ sat in a shared mailbox for a day and a half because the person who normally reads it was on the floor.
AI for MRO starts here, in the commercial front door, not in the data lake.
Quoting: from days to the same afternoon
The workflow has three parts.
Capture. Every inbound message is parsed and classified. RFQ, AOG, routine enquiry, supplier reply, invoice query. Each gets an owner and an SLA clock. Nothing sits unattributed.
Draft. The system pulls the part numbers and scope out of the RFQ, matches them to your rate card, historic jobs and parts availability, and produces a draft quote. It is not guessing prices; it is assembling from your own data.
Approve. An estimator reviews and sends. This step never gets removed. What changes is that they are reviewing rather than building, which is roughly a ten to one difference in time.
The measurable outcomes are quote turnaround, percentage of RFQs answered inside target, and win rate by customer and platform. Most shops have never had those numbers reliably before, which is often the more interesting change.
AOG: detection and escalation
An AOG request that waits two hours in a mailbox is a commercial problem and a relationship problem. The fix is detection plus a fallback chain.
Detection scores urgency on language, customer and platform, deliberately tuned to over flag rather than miss. Escalation alerts the duty engineer through whatever channel they actually watch, then escalates again if nobody acknowledges within a set window. Every response time is recorded, so when a customer asks how quickly you responded last quarter, the answer is a report.
Out of hours cover is where this pays back hardest. Detection and escalation do not sleep, and you stop relying on someone checking their phone out of goodwill.
What it takes to implement
Less than people expect, because nothing needs replacing. We read from the systems you already run, whether that is Aerotrac, Quantum, Ramco, Salesforce or a spreadsheet rate card, and write back only where you want. First automations typically go live in weeks.
The order matters
Quoting first, then AOG, then parts and compliance. That order is not universal, but it is the right default because quoting touches revenue and the baseline is easy to measure. If you would like the version of this tailored to your shop, book a free consultation.