An email arrives on a Tuesday morning. It reads, in full:
We are reformulating a wood coating and need a texturing additive. Nothing coarser than 20 microns, and it has to be PFAS-free. What do you recommend?
Two sentences. A customer who knows what they want. This should be quick.
It is not quick.
First, the requirements have to be pulled apart. "Nothing coarser than 20 microns" is not a request for a product with a 20-micron average. It is a ceiling on the largest particles in the container. Those are different numbers, and a data sheet often lists only one of them. "PFAS-free" is a hard veto that eliminates entire chemistries. "Wood coating" implies a waterborne or solventborne system that the customer has not specified, which may or may not matter depending on what survives the first two filters.
Then the catalogue has to be checked. A mid-size producer might have three hundred grades. Perhaps forty are plausible for texture in coatings. Each has a technical data sheet, and the relevant number sits in a different place on each one: a typical-properties table here, a footnote there, a range expressed in mesh rather than microns somewhere else. The rep opens ten or fifteen of them.
Then the eliminations have to be justified. It is not enough to decide a grade fails. When the customer asks why, the answer has to point at something. So the rep notes which line of which sheet ruled it out, because a coatings chemist will ask and a vague answer costs the deal.
Then the regulatory language has to be checked, exactly. Not summarised. Compliance people quote the sentence. A paraphrase that drops a qualifier is worse than no answer.
Then the reply gets written. Two or three recommendations, the reasoning, an offer of samples, and the questions the customer did not answer — is the system waterborne, what is the target sheen, what is the film thickness.
Industry sources put the total for a serious inquiry like this at six to eight hours. Not six hours of skilled judgment. Perhaps twenty minutes of judgment, wrapped in hours of document retrieval.
And the rep is not paid to retrieve documents. They are paid to sell. Published figures put the share of a sales representative's time spent actually selling below forty percent. The rest is absorbed by exactly this kind of work.
The uncomfortable part is that the hours are invisible. Nobody bills them. They do not appear in a report. They surface only as a slower quote than a competitor's, an inquiry that waited three days, or a senior person who cannot take on another account because they are the only one who can answer questions like this quickly.
That is the work we set out to compress. Not the judgment, which belongs to the rep. The retrieval, which does not belong to anyone.