Teaching AI 30 years of rules: how every quote gets checked before it goes out

AI isn’t valuable because it knows everything. It’s valuable when you can teach it what you know.

In 30 years of designing, selling and fitting kitchens and bathrooms, you build up thousands of small rules. Things that look fine on paper but cost the fitter half a day three weeks later.

All of that lived in my head. That made me useful. It also made me the bottleneck.

The mistakes that never look like mistakes

None of these look obviously wrong on a quote:

• A design drawn with herringbone tiling, priced as brick bond. Same tile, completely different labour.
• A wall-hung WC with a frame that won’t fit under the window it’s going beneath.
• A combi microwave and a pyrolytic oven, with no upgraded electrics on the quote.
• Wallpaper stripping in the notes — and no plastering anywhere.

Every one of them ends the same way: a failed installation, a return visit and hundreds of pounds putting it right.

So I wrote the rules down — and taught the system

Every bathroom quote in my business is now checked by our own rules engine before it goes out. It knows what a job needs, not just what was typed. A tray needs a waste. A basin needs a tap and a waste. If something is drawn in the room, it has to be on the quote, or marked as the customer’s own.

The checks run while the designer is still working on the quote, so mistakes are caught at the quote stage — not discovered on site three weeks later.

It’s training as much as checking

These are the mistakes new designers make every week. Not because they’re careless, but because nobody ever wrote the rules down. Now they get an explanation of what’s wrong, and pick up years of knowledge far faster.

AI without experience gives you an answer. AI with experience gives you a system.

What do you know that nobody in your business has written down yet?

If you want help getting it out of your head and into a system, apply to work with me.