Ericsson has moved contract-based quoting into customer self-service on SAP Commerce Cloud, and SAP says requests that once took days or more than two weeks now often finish in minutes or seconds.
What happened
In a feature published October 15, SAP describes how Ericsson handles quotes tied to multi-year framework agreements. Those agreements carry negotiated pricing, contract-specific products and customer entitlements. A customer who came back months after signing used to contact an account representative, who gathered the information, validated the contract terms and prepared the quote by hand.
With SAP Commerce Cloud, Ericsson now gives customers dedicated storefronts built around their agreements. Customers browse the products available to them, generate quotes and place orders without manual intervention from account teams. SAP says many of those requests now take minutes or even seconds.
Ericsson is also evaluating whether AI agents can analyze customer requests, find the relevant contract information and prepare proposed quotes for human review. SAP says employees stay responsible for oversight and decisions.
Why it matters
Quoting is where pricing rules, contract terms and approvals meet the sales cycle, and at Ericsson the wait sat with the account representative who assembled each quote. Ericsson changed the order of work. The contract rules went into a system customers can reach directly, and agents are only now being evaluated on top of them. Aaron Thomas, Ericsson’s global product owner, framed it as a move from manual processes to digitized and automated ones, with the agent question coming after.
The takeaway for sales teams
An agent that drafts quotes can only be as accurate as the contract and pricing data it can read. Teams that still keep entitlements in email threads and in reps’ memories have nothing for an agent to read, so the sequence Ericsson followed is the one to copy: structure the rules first, then add the agent. For related reading, see SAP’s earlier preview of AI-assisted quoting and Threekit’s AI-native CPQ for manufacturers.
Source: SAP News Center
