We build retrieval assistants for wholesale distributors: a layer over your catalog, datasheets, PDFs, cross-references, and order history, surfaced inside your B2B portal. Customers and your sales team ask in plain language and get the right part, spec, or substitute 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 portal holds every answer a customer needs. The catalog has the SKUs. The PDFs have the specs, the safety sheets, the installation guides. Your senior reps know what fits what, what subs for what when something's out of stock, which discontinued part has a newer equivalent.
The portal can't get to any of it.
A customer types "wire cover so it doesn't get hit by nails" into your portal. 200+ results come back, sorted by SKU number. The customer gives up and emails your inside sales team, or checks whether a competitor's portal suggests the right product instead of showing them the whole catalog.
The portal wasn't built for the questions you actually get. Someone asks how much Triclopyr 4 to mix per gallon for sixteen acres. New customers ask what you carry. Existing ones ask their price on a SKU, whether something's in stock, what subs for a part that's been retired. The rep handles each one because the portal can't.
Wire cover so it doesn't get hit by nails?
Nail plate, 16-gauge steel, sized to cover standard 1/2" Romex. 24 in stock at your tier. If you're running multiple, the 5-inch width covers two parallel runs.
A retrieval assistant makes sense when all three of these are true.
Thousands of SKUs, manufacturer datasheets, installation manuals, supersession lists, cross-reference tables. The answers are in your documents. Your portal can't surface them.
Fitment, substitutes, in-stock checks, technical specs, account lookups. Not the "find SKU 4827" type that keyword search handles. The kind that need interpretation, comparison, or context. The questions land on your senior team, who answer them instead of selling.
Retailers, contractors, and buyers come to it daily to find products, place orders, and self-serve. When it can't help them, they email your reps 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 run an evaluation harness against a golden dataset, real questions paired with their correct answers and source documents. Every change to the system gets tested against that dataset before anything ships. We track accuracy, citation correctness, latency, cost per query, and refusal rates using Arize Phoenix for trace-level observability. You see the numbers before launch. Anything below the agreed bar gets fixed before go-live.
Wherever you want it. We deploy in your cloud, in your on-prem environment, or in a dedicated tenant we manage for you. The embeddings, the document index, and the retrieval engine belong to you. We don't pool data across customers.
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 a retrieval assistant makes sense for your business or whether we'd recommend something simpler.
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 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