Every food distributor knows the feeling: orders coming in from everywhere at once: emails, texts, voicemails, and handwritten notes turned into photos. Each one is urgent and slightly different. And behind every order is someone on your team reading, interpreting, and keying it in, hoping nothing gets missed.

In this session, Nick and Angela take a tour of Pepper’s AI-powered Order Automation, Order Agent. From real-world use cases to a live demo, they explore how distributors can modernize everyday workflows and how AI becomes a practical growth lever rather than a buzzword.

The Real Problem: Order Entry Is Still Holding Teams Back

Order entry hasn’t kept pace and is still largely a manual process for most teams.

During the webinar, a familiar pattern emerged:

• Orders arrive in dozens of formats, rarely standardized
• Sales teams spend hours retyping the same information
• Errors slip in, such as wrong pack sizes, missed items, and pricing mismatches
• Reps are stuck doing data entry instead of selling or servicing accounts

Most distributors are still relying on people to act as the glue between messy inbound orders and their ERP. That work is essential, but it’s also time-consuming, difficult to scale, and increasingly expensive as order volume grows.

Meet Order Agent: Automation That Works the Way Distributors Do

Order Agent is Pepper’s AI-powered solution built to handle inbound orders, no matter how customers choose to place their orders. It reads, understands, and converts incoming messages into clean, structured orders that are ready for review and submission. 

Order Agent supports voice, text, emails, PDFs, images, and other unstructured formats by identifying items, quantities, pack sizes, and customer context. It also flags uncertainty instead of guessing and continuously improves as it sees more orders.

Order Agent doesn’t replace your team. It supports them by taking the first pass at the work so your team can focus on exceptions, customers, and growth.

AI That’s Built In, Not Bolted On

One of the biggest misconceptions is that all AI is created equal. However, there’s a difference between AI that sounds impressive and AI that actually works.

Many tools promise automation, but add complexity by sitting outside existing workflows. As Nick emphasized, automation only works when it’s embedded directly into how teams already operate. 

Order Agent:

• Learns from real distributor data
• Understands distributor-specific catalogs and naming conventions
• Connects directly to the systems teams already rely on
• Improves accuracy without adding more work

When using AI, the goal isn’t just “automation for automation’s sake.” It’s about creating a process that’s faster, more reliable, and easier to scale as your business grows. With Order Agent, the result is automation that feels natural, like an extension of your existing process, not another system to manage.

Accuracy Without Losing Control

Order Agent is designed for trust, not blind automation.

When Order Agent is certain, it moves fast. When something doesn’t look right, it raises its hand. So, Instead of forcing teams to fix mistakes after the fact, Order Agent surfaces ambiguity upfront and allows staff to review, confirm, and move on.

That balance matters in food distribution, where a small error can ripple through fulfillment, invoicing, and customer relationships. With Order Agent, accuracy improves while humans stay firmly in control.

What This Means for Sales, Ops, and the Customer

The impact of Order Agent goes beyond the back office: Sales and customer service teams regain hours each week previously lost to rework and manual entry, while operations teams see cleaner, more consistent orders that align with ERP workflows and reduce downstream issues. Customers experience faster responses, fewer errors, and a smoother ordering process, which directly impacts retention and repeat business.

It’s not about doing more with fewer people. It’s about letting people do the work only they can do, while AI handles the repetitive, error-prone tasks in the background.

Live Demo: Order Agent in Action

Watch the video to see Nick and Angela walk through how orders move through a consistent, automated workflow, showing how teams can:

• Process orders faster without sacrificing accuracy
• Reduce back-and-forth on routine orders
• Isolate and handle exceptions without slowing everything else down
• Stay aligned with ERP requirements end-to-end

Rather than forcing a one-size-fits-all model, the demo highlighted flexibility: automation that adapts to how your business already runs.

The Future Belongs to the Distributors Who Adapt

When order intake runs smoothly, everything downstream improves. Sales teams sell more. Operations teams focus on improvement instead of cleanup. Customers get a more professional, reliable buying experience.

The future of food distribution isn’t about replacing people with technology. It’s about being faster, more responsive, and easier to do business with, while protecting what makes your business unique.

Pepper’s role in that future is clear: act as a true partner that is dedicated to helping independents succeed by designing our business around yours.

If order entry is slowing your business down, Order Agent is ready to step in and let your business focus on what really moves the needle.

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