Six million maps. Thirty-six million books. Seventy-five million manuscripts. The Library of Congress is recognized as the largest library in the world.

Imagine walking into this massive library, trying to find a specific book. You know the book you want and what it looks like, but without an index, you’re lost. You could spend hours, maybe days, hunting through all the shelves, trying to find what you’re looking for.

Now imagine you not only have an index, but an artificial intelligence (AI) librarian at your side. This librarian knows every single book, every single page and every single word across the entire library.

All you do is ask the question, and the AI librarian instantly hands you the book you’re looking for, opens it up to the right page and points to the right sentence.

This is the difference between knowledge storage and knowledge access.

As reps, historically, you’ve had a library: product catalogs, PDFs, emails, memos, contracts, price sheets, etc. It’s probably not 100% complete or very organized, but you have a library.

The problem is, you don’t have the index. 

Until now.

In 2025, every rep can have instant knowledge access. You can have your own AI librarian that opens up to exactly the right sentence for you from the millions of potential documents and does it almost instantaneously.

Say goodbye to the frustrating days of trying to find the right information at the right time, sometimes spending hours digging and making back-and-forth calls to do so.

Poor knowledge access is lost revenue

The most obvious examples of losing revenue are scenarios involving product information. Here are a handful of scenarios that reps face on almost a daily basis:

 The outside sales rep gets a question from a potential client about the specs of some products. The rep is on the road, so searching through the documentation on the manufacturer’s website on a phone is difficult. He calls the inside rep for insight, so that rep has to pause what he is doing, search through the documents, find the right one, read through a long PDF and identify the answer. 

Or worse, he can’t find the answer either and must call the manufacturer’s support line. This results in hours of downtime.

Your firm gets several large project documents, and you need to go through and develop product crosses for all the products in the project where you don’t rep that line. Reading through the 100-plus page document to find the correct information takes time, gathering all the products that need to be crossed takes time, and then looking through documentation to try and identify each cross takes time. 

Hours and hours later, the team is exhausted and probably still not quite done.

 Customers call in with urgent requests to check compatibility, warranties, installation and other relevant questions. They are already frazzled and want fast information. Your team has to tell them someone will call back after they’ve found the answer, adding to customers’ frustration and giving them poor customer experience.

The list can go on, especially when considering information from other sources such as contracts, pricing, certifications, engineering drawings, etc.

Let’s consider what these scenarios look like with the help of an AI Librarian:

The outside sales rep gets a question about a spec. He asks the AI librarian system, and it answers the question immediately while providing the supporting documentation.

 You give your project document to the AI Librarian; it instantly identifies all the products that require a cross and gives you the suggested crosses based on your lines, again providing the supporting documentation almost instantly.

 The call comes in, and your rep asks the AI librarian on the side, getting an immediate answer and supporting documentation. He answers the customer immediately, and it’s a great customer service interaction.

With current technology, these interactions can be done right now, saving your rep firm frustration, hours and cost while giving you more time to win deals, increase customer service and create more efficient operations. This leads to more revenue and profit.

Choosing the right tool for your firm

New AI tools come out seemingly every day. Many are just simple wrappers of the major players, such as OpenAI, so it’s important to be selective and find the ones that actually offer distinct value.

This is not an exhaustive list, but here are three tools you could get going with almost immediately to start getting some of the results we’ve discussed:

 Notebook LM. Google developed this tool, and it’s free to use (www.notebooklm.google). You can upload many documents, and it allows you to ask natural language questions about those documents. It will also help prompt you on additional questions you may want to ask, organize the results of your questions and even create podcasts from your documents that sound like humans produced them.

Pros:

This tool is free to use;

Several features can help you prompt and organize responses;

You can load documents in many different formats;

You can create full-on podcasts, which is pretty unique to this tool (for now).

Cons:

Includes a limit to the amount of documents you can load on the free version;

The learning curve isn’t large, but not as simple as only a chat window;

The context window is sometimes limiting in getting the answers you want.

Best for: 

If you want something a little more robust than ChatGPT with more features and only want to work with a limited data set, or are creating podcasts or study guides is your main goal, this is a great choice.

 chatGPT. Developed by OpenAI, this is the tool that made generative AI popular across the world (www.chatgpt.com). It has the fastest-growing adoption rate of any app before it. It features a simple, clean interface and includes some helpful features to search the internet and find answers for you. It has good reasoning capabilities, but you still must watch out for occasional hallucinations and wrong information. 

Pros:

Very simple and easy to use;

The free version lets you talk to a handful of documents at a time;

New projects feature lets you add a mass of documents for it to consistently read from ($20/user/month).

Cons:

Not as many features as on Notebook LM;

You have to upgrade to pro to store and analyze documents;

It sometimes hallucinates and gives you incorrect information.

Best for:

If you want to start as simple as possible, for free, and get a feel for chatting with an AI assistant and pulling answers from documents, this is a great place to start. You can upgrade, although you still face data upload limitations and potential hallucinations on the pro version.

 FlowBot Chat. Developed by Flow, this tool is 100% focused on manufacturing rep firms and their needs (www.flowbot.chat). It automatically pulls in product catalogs and information from your manufacturers’ websites and can push data directly to you from the growing list of manufacturers that integrate with the system. 

It has a simple, intuitive chat interface, and you can upload any documents (product catalogs, price sheets, p-schedules, contracts, etc.) to build a comprehensive library where you can ask questions. Trained not to hallucinate, this will also reference the document from which it found the answer so you can reference it yourself.

Pros:

Built specifically for manufacturing sales reps, it’s great at product specs, product crosses, and other common questions reps have;

No limit to the data you can upload and get answers from;

Several AI models work under the hood to find the right answers and deliver them, with the reference document, without hallucinating;

•Built for agencies to be able to work together as a team, with a growing list of manufacturers integrating their data natively;

Includes a generous free trial.

Cons:

If you’re not a manufacturer’s rep or operating in that ecosystem, this may not be the tool for you;

No permanent free tier, but at $10/user/month, it is very accessible.

Best for: 

This is the tool for manufacturing sales reps who want a quick setup, access to comprehensive data, integrations to their manufacturers and assurance that you’re getting correct answers with references.

AI is not a technology fad or a bubble. Rep firms use it today to get wildly more efficient operations and take their firms to the next level.

There are several options to get going with AI and start to reap the benefits, and the great news is it doesn’t require major investments of time or money. 

2025 is the year of AI for reps! Give it a try with some of the tools mentioned, and start reaping the benefits. 

Curtis Seare is the CEO of Flow RMS, and for nearly 15 years, he has been making data and AI practical and profitable for businesses. As the former co-host of the acclaimed “Data Crunch” podcast and current host of the “Flowing Sales” podcast, Seare combines deep technical expertise with actionable insights to help reps, distributors and manufacturers transform their workflows.