A hardware store that answers "do you have it?" before anyone walks the aisle
Staff at a family hardware store spent their afternoons walking aisles to answer phone questions about stock. An AI agent that reads the till's inventory now takes the first pass.
This shows the kind of work we do. It is not a client engagement, and the business in it is invented.
- 11 hrsa week of aisle-walking handed back to the shop floor
- 2 hrshold on anything a caller reserves, released automatically
- 37products added to the reorder list in the first quarter, all from questions the store couldn't answer
Where it started
The problem
Half the calls were one question. Have you got a three-quarter-inch brass gate valve, and how many?
Answering meant putting the caller on hold, walking to aisle 14, counting, and walking back. On an April Saturday that was most of one person's shift, and the customers queueing at the counter watched it happen.
What changed
What we did
We connected an AI agent to the point-of-sale inventory through a read-only account. It can look things up. It can't change a price or a count, which was the first thing the owner asked about.
Phone callers and website chat reach the same agent. It gives the shelf count and the aisle, offers to hold the item for two hours, and hands over to a person the moment a stock question turns into advice about a job.
The till's counts were wrong more often than anyone liked. So a hold doubles as a spot check: when somebody goes to pull a held item and it isn't there, the correction goes straight back into the system.
We run it as a managed service. Each month we read a sample of conversations, fix the answers it fumbled, and send the owner a short note on what people asked for that the store doesn't carry.
Built with
- Lightspeed Retail API
- Node.js
- Twilio Voice
- PostgreSQL
Services in this job
AI Agent & Workflow Automation
Agents that do the job, with a log of every step
Managed AI Services & Support
Someone minding the AI after launch day
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