AI skill · Volume 1 · Workflow W4
How can AI speed up a TIC quotation without touching the price?
It maps a customer request to your service catalogue for an engineer to review, and drafts a one-page cover note for the quote. It never sets a price.
It is workflow W4 of the twelve in The AI-Augmented TIC Sales Machine, sold on its own as one AI skill file (.zip) with a two-page start-here guide. Everything it writes is a draft for a person to check.
What you give it, and what comes back.
You attach: the customer request and your service catalogue.
You get back: A proposed programme for engineer review, with no prices, and a quote cover note.
It does not: set or check a price. An engineer reviews the scope.
The customer request and your service catalogue. For the cover note, also the calculated quote, the company, a scope summary, the lead time and your references.
One run, start to finish
What it looks like when you use it.
Run in Claude (Opus 5, high effort), in our own Claude account with the skill installed on 20 September 2026. Harbourline Testing Services, its catalogue and its customer are invented for this example, and the run is shown as it came back, unedited. It is not a scope opinion: what a product needs is set by your engineers against your accreditation scope. Your assistant's wording will differ: AI answers change between assistants and between runs.
input · what was given to the skill
Our firm. Harbourline Testing Services: electrical safety, EMC and food contact testing for household appliances.
Service catalogue (extract). EL-104 electrical safety, EN 60335-1 with EN 60335-2-14, per sample, laboratory. EM-220 radiated and conducted emissions, EN 55014-1, per sample, chamber. EM-231 immunity, EN 55014-2, per sample, chamber. EM-240 harmonic current emissions, EN 61000-3-2, per sample, laboratory. EM-241 voltage changes, fluctuations and flicker, EN 61000-3-3, per sample, laboratory. EF-310 electromagnetic field exposure, EN 62233, per sample, laboratory. AC-410 airborne noise, EN 60704-2-3, per sample, acoustic room. FC-520 food contact migration for plastics, EU 10/2011, per material, chemistry laboratory.
The customer's request. "We make a mains-powered kitchen blender, 230 V, glass jar with a plastic lid and a stainless blade. No wireless. We want to sell it in the EU and the UK from next March. Our component suppliers hold the RoHS declarations. Can you quote the testing? We can send six samples. What else do we need?"
output · what came back
Draft scope proposal, for engineer review. Not a quotation. No prices or lead times here.
Customer: mains kitchen blender, 230 V, glass jar, plastic lid, stainless blade, no wireless. Markets: EU and UK. Six samples offered.
what to notice, and one thing to watch
The useful part is section 4. A scoping assistant that names what your catalogue does not cover is worth more than one that quietly maps everything to something you sell, because that is how a partial quotation reaches a customer looking complete. Notice too that nothing is priced, and that the sample count is left to an engineer.
Section 5 is the thing to watch, and it is why every skill says to check anything material against its source. The skill tells the assistant to read only what you attach. Here the assistant went further on its own, added a point of UK law, and cited two compliance websites for it. The point of law is right, and we checked it ourselves at the primary source: the Product Safety and Metrology etc. (Amendment) Regulations 2024, SI 2024/696, in force 1 October 2024, and the Government's own guidance on continued recognition of CE marking for Great Britain (both read 20 September 2026). The sourcing in the run was not. An assistant can be right and badly sourced at the same time, and a person has to be the one who tells the difference. That is the whole point of the guardrails: they narrow what you have to check, and the run above shows they do not remove it. The engineer still owns the scope, the pricing engine still sets the price, and a named person still approves what reaches the customer.
The skill, or the report?
This workflow is not sold on its own. It comes with The AI-Augmented TIC Sales Machine, which sets out the method and the evidence for all twelve of its workflows, and every licence includes all twelve as ready-made skill files at no extra cost.