SourcePilot

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Inspiration

SourcePilot was inspired by the challenges faced by small-business owners who manage procurement without a dedicated team. Finding reliable suppliers, making repeated calls, negotiating prices, following up and comparing inconsistent quotes can consume hours that owners could spend growing their businesses. We wanted to make this process faster while ensuring that owners remain in control of every purchasing decision.

What it does

The owner speaks or types a procurement request. SourcePilot asks only for missing details, then confirms the exact item, quantity, delivery address and deadline, all-in budget, substitutions, payment period, and deposit cap before sourcing starts. The supplier list is filtered to businesses with a confirmed ABN and owner authorisation. Suppliers are contacted by voice first, with SMS or email available for follow-up. Quotes are normalised and ranked by total cost, availability, delivery, payment terms, reliability, and call sentiment. SourcePilot negotiates within explicit price and payment-term limits. A request can either require a separate owner approval or store an owner/admin pre-authorisation. Pre-authorised requests may issue one purchase order automatically only when every exact product, supplier, total, quantity, delivery, and payment rule passes. SourcePilot never initiates payment. Once the purchase order is sent, SourcePilot calls the owner with the result and payment terms. A declined, busy, unanswered, unavailable, or voicemail call triggers both an SMS and an AgentMail email. It clearly says supplier acceptance is still pending. The language model extracts details and prepares natural conversation. Deterministic application rules control supplier eligibility, negotiation limits, ranking, disclosure, and purchase approval.

How we built it

We built SourcePilot as a mobile-first web application using React, TypeScript and Vite. ElevenLabs powers the conversational voice experience, while language models support supplier discovery, request clarification and structured quote extraction. Supabase manages organisational data, workflow states and security, while deterministic application rules control supplier eligibility, negotiation limits, quote ranking and purchase-order approval.

Challenges we ran into

One of our biggest challenges was coordinating an asynchronous workflow involving supplier discovery, phone calls, transcripts, follow-up messages and purchase orders. We also needed to transform unpredictable conversations into reliable structured data while preventing the AI from exceeding the owner’s authority. Retries, unanswered calls, duplicate actions, supplier verification and organisation-level data isolation added further technical complexity.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to have developed an end-to-end procurement workflow that goes beyond a basic voice assistant. SourcePilot can discover supplier leads, verify ABNs, require owner authorisation, conduct sequential supplier calls, extract and compare quotes, negotiate within explicit limits, send follow-ups and issue a purchase order only when every approval condition passes. It maintains human oversight and never initiates payment.

What we learned

We learned that AI is most effective when combined with clear deterministic controls. Language models are valuable for understanding requests and conducting natural conversations, but eligibility, budgets, approvals and purchasing rules must remain predictable and auditable. We also learned how important retries, signed webhooks, idempotent actions and transparent status updates are when building dependable voice-based business workflows.

What's next for SourcePilot

Next, we plan to strengthen SourcePilot through production deployment, broader supplier coverage and integrations with accounting, inventory and enterprise procurement systems. We also want to introduce multilingual supplier conversations, improved supplier-performance insights and more extensive evaluation of quote extraction and negotiation outcomes. Our long-term vision is to make professional procurement support accessible to every small business.

Visit the app here: https://forward-rust.vercel.app Test email: [email protected] Test password: password