---
title: How AI processing works
order: 2
updated: 2026-07-18
---

# How AI processing works

Every few minutes the system reads new mail from each connected inbox and turns each relevant email into a **staged document** you can review in the AI Inbox. Nothing is ever saved into your live records automatically — you always approve first.

## What the system does with each email

1. **Identifies the sender.** The sender's email address is matched against your contact persons. If it belongs to a customer, the email is treated as a customer message; if it belongs to a supplier, a supplier message; otherwise it's marked as an unknown sender.

2. **Classifies the email** from *your firm's* point of view:
   - **Enquiry** — a customer asking about products / requesting a price.
   - **Sales Order** — a customer confirming an order you will deliver.
   - **Quotation** — a supplier sending you their rates.
   - **Other** — anything else (ignored, but kept in a log).

   If the email's content seems to conflict with the sender's role (for example, a "quotation" that appears to come from a customer), the system re-checks it several times before deciding, and flags it for you.

3. **Extracts the details.** Body text, plus PDFs, images, Word, Excel and CSV attachments, are read to pull out the product lines — name, quantity, description, and price where present.

4. **Matches products to your catalogue.** Each extracted line is matched to a product head and product code in your records, with a confidence score. Repeated boilerplate (the code's standard description) is stripped so only the custom details remain.

5. **Recognises follow-ups of the same event.** One portal RFQ often produces a burst of emails — the invitation, "next round" invitations, and end-date reminders. The system spots when a new email belongs to an enquiry it has **already staged** — by the email thread, by the event / RFQ / enquiry number it quotes, or (when there's no number at all) by comparing the sender and subject against recent events — and folds it into the **same inbox card** instead of creating a new row. When it isn't sure, it deliberately keeps the email as a **separate card** with a *possible duplicate* hint: a duplicate row costs you one click, but a real enquiry hidden inside the wrong group could cost you an order.

6. **Stages it for review.** The result waits in the **AI Inbox**. Customer and supplier names, dates, and matched products are all filled in from your existing records — never invented. When you approve, the document is written **directly** into your records — there is no half-finished "draft enquiry" step to come back to and complete later.

## Where the email came in — Mail vs Portal

Each staged item remembers how it reached the system, and that decides the **mode** of the enquiry it becomes:

- **Mail** — the email arrived in a connected inbox the system listens to. This is the normal path.
- **Portal** — the item was captured from a procurement portal page using the browser RFQ-clipper **extension** (see **[Browser extension](extension)**).

When you approve such an item, the enquiry is created with the matching mode (Mail or Portal) so you can tell at a glance whether it came in by email or off a vendor portal.

## Attachments

How attachments are read depends on the AI model your administrator has configured:

- **Excel, CSV, Word, and text files** are always read as text.
- **PDFs and images** are read directly when the configured model supports it; otherwise text is extracted where possible. If a file can't be read (for example a scanned image with no text), it's skipped and noted on the draft so you know to open it yourself.

## Privacy

The system only reads mail to draft documents. It never sends, replies, or changes anything in your mailbox, and access is read-only.