Commercial purchasing is high-stakes engineering. When an organization issues a Request for Quotes across dozens or hundreds of discrete items, suppliers respond with wildly inconsistent documents.
Supplier quotes arrive formatted as custom multi-tab spreadsheets, scanned or digital PDFs, and raw email attachments. One supplier quotes per box of 100, another per individual unit, and a third in master cartons with minimum order quantities. Freight lines, fuel surcharges, and payment validity terms are buried in footnotes or omitted entirely.
Procurement professionals spend countless hours manually re-keying prices into makeshift comparison spreadsheets—an error-prone grind where pack mistakes and unbundled surcharges routinely flip the true low bidder.
Off-the-shelf generative AI models promise automation, but LLMs are stochastic token generators. When applied to commercial arithmetic, they invent numbers, fail at multi-step unit conversions, and hallucinate totals without verifiable proof. For high-stakes purchasing, arithmetic guessing is unacceptable.