How an HVAC distributor keeps its partner CRM up to date with an AI agent

Who is the company and why does its CRM fall behind?

Picture a distributor of HVAC and plumbing equipment: boilers, pumps, valves, ducting. It buys from several suppliers and sells to installation companies, through Markonex.

The Markonex CRM has a record for every partner, with notes, contacts, tags, the relationship type and the transaction and price history. But after a busy day, nobody fills in the notes and tags.

What did the CRM look like before the agent?

The transaction history filled in automatically, but the context was missing: why a supplier was chosen, what was negotiated, which partner is both a customer and a supplier.

• New partners had no relationship type and no tags.
• Notes about agreements were missing or written differently by every colleague.
• Price comparisons across suppliers happened only when someone remembered.

What do you need to start an agent like this?

Markonex Agents are Claude agents, from Anthropic, that a company creates in the Markonex Agents web app. The agent works for the company, not for a single employee, and uses the company's own Anthropic API key: model usage is paid directly to Anthropic, from the company's prepaid credits, not to Markonex. The cost shown in the app is an estimate.

• The company is verified by the platform (the "Verified by the platform" badge).
• The administrator turns on Agents and MCP under My company → AI assistants → Agents and ticks the information notice.
• In Markonex Agents, under "API keys", the company adds its Anthropic key; only the last 4 characters remain visible.
• The "New agent" wizard has these steps: API key, Model, Instructions, Permissions, Schedules, Limits (monthly budget, per-run budget, maximum runs per day) and Summary.
• Permissions in plain language: read access to the CRM, agreements and offers, and write access to the CRM (adding partners, relationship type, tags, notes, contacts). Every CRM write is approved.

How do you try it safely, before using real data?

Every company has a separate test environment: a "(TEST)" company and up to two test partner companies, with their own data, no emails, no push notifications and no ANAF or e-Factura. There you can close a sample agreement with a test partner company and see which notes and tags the agent proposes.

In the test environment the agent confirms its own actions, so you can see the whole flow quickly. In the real account the same actions wait for a person to approve them. The test environment can be reset or deleted at any time.

Step 1: set the CRM rules

To stay consistent, the agent needs clear rules: which tags you use, what a good note looks like and when a partner is a customer, a supplier or both.

1. Agent instructions

   Every Friday, check the agreements from the past week. If the partner is not in our list, add them and set the relationship type: Supplier if we bought, Customer if we sold, Customer and supplier if both. Use only our existing tags: HVAC, plumbing, pumps, short lead times. Write a 3-line note for each agreement: what was bought or sold, the price and what was negotiated. At the end, compare pump prices across suppliers and tell me if one has gone up.

Step 2: schedule the Friday run

The schedule can be Friday at 15:00, so approvals happen before the weekend. Under "Limits" you set the budget and the maximum number of runs.

Step 3: the agent prepares the CRM changes

The agent reads the agreements, the partner history and the price history, then prepares the new partners, tags and notes. Each change appears as a prepared action.

1. Markonex Agents - approval

   The agent wants to run a prepared action: add the note "Agreement for 12 circulation pumps, delivery in 7 days; price fell 3% in round two in exchange for payment in 30 days." to the partner record. Approve / Reject

Step 4: approve the changes and read the price comparison

The responsible person approves or rejects each change in Markonex Agents. The price comparison is read-only, so it appears directly in the run report.

1. The agent

   I prepared 2 new partners, 5 notes and 3 tags, all awaiting approval. Pump price comparison: the price from the supplier we have the most agreements with went up compared with the previous agreement, and another supplier on our list recently offered a lower price for a similar model.

What does the company gain from an up-to-date CRM?

Each partner record tells the full story, not just the figures: what was negotiated and why. Everyone uses the tags the same way, and price increases show up in the weekly comparison. As an illustrative estimate, a few hours a month of updating the CRM can become a few minutes of approving changes; the real effect depends on the number of agreements.

What limits and safeguards does the agent have?

The agent has a single tool: the Markonex MCP server. It does not browse the web, open files or run code. It has no memory between runs: each run starts from the data in the platform and the instructions the company wrote. The agent works only with the company's partners in Markonex and only with data tied to platform transactions; every CRM change goes through approval.

• It works only with the permissions ticked when it was created, within the rights of the user whose identity it uses.
• Schedules run at most once an hour, on Romanian time; a run may start a few minutes late.
• Prepared commercial actions wait for approval by a user with the agents-management permission, who is notified in the app, by push or by email; the approval is valid for 24 hours and only while the run is still active.
• An approved action runs in the name of the person who approved it, and the activity log shows "Name (via Anthropic agent #id)".
• The agent cannot issue or cancel invoices, sends nothing to e-Factura, makes no payments and cannot administer the company or its users.
• If the administrator turns Agents off for the company, all agent access is revoked at once.