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GIC scaled its food import operations with AI agents—without changing a single system

A second-generation family business eliminated manual order entry while preserving its relationship-first culture and legacy ERP.

Reduce costs

95%

reduction in order entry time (up to)

Portfolio

> 2x

capacity gain for order processing per day

Compliance

90-100%

accuracy on handwritten & typed orders

The challenge

Golden International Company (GIC) has spent two generations building something most businesses can’t buy: trust. As a family-owned import, export, and distribution firm serving customers across the U.S. and Asia, GIC competes on relationships, not rigid systems. Customers place orders the way they prefer: handwritten notes from in-person meetings, photos, PDFs, emails, scanned documents, selecting from over a thousand different product SKUs. Conventional software can’t absorb that variety without forcing people into a new portal or template, which would erode the very relationships GIC built its business on. 

That flexibility is a competitive advantage for GIC. But behind the scenes, it created an enormous bottleneck. Every incoming order required manual interpretation and re-entry into GIC’s legacy ERP system (E21): a process that could take anywhere from 5 minutes to 2 hours per order. “We deal with over 100 shipping containers containing thousands of individual items in each container every month,” says Lawrence Hou, GIC Director of Operations. When orders poured in, it became an all-hands-on-deck situation that pulled staff away from the relationships that drive the business.  

GIC considered traditional fixes: replace the ERP or build a digital intake portal. Both would have required customers to change how they work—exactly what GIC had built its reputation by not doing. They needed a better path, one that no traditional system could realistically automate. 

Image of open GIC catalog

 

“We get orders so many ways. With traditional software, it wasn’t practical to automate. We can’t believe what’s possible with AI agents. It’s changing our business without changing our processes.”

– Lawrence Hou, Director of Operations, Golden International Company

The solution

Prowess Consulting built a custom agentic AI solution that met GIC exactly where they were. It wrapped around their existing workflows instead of asking the business to adopt new ones. In a matter of weeks, the team designed and deployed an order entry agent using Gemini (for reasoning) and n8n (for orchestration), with zero changes required to GIC’s ERP or customer workflows. 

Figure 1: Example of an actual handwritten order from a GIC customer transposed by the AI agent.

The agent accepts orders in any of the ways GIC’s customers already send them: handwritten notes, photos, PDFs, or typed documents. It converts inputs to text using OCR and handwriting recognition, matches line items against GIC’s existing product catalog, and assigns a confidence score to each entry. What’s more, it takes context into account: if other items in the order are all Vietnamese, the agent considers that more strongly when trying to match an uncertain item. High-confidence items flow directly into the ERP; low-confidence items are flagged for a quick human review before submission.

The result: a human-in-the-loop process that automates the tedious without removing the judgment. The team trained on it in a single session. By the end of the prototype phase, the GIC team had shifted from curiosity to confidence: “When can we go live?” 

The result

Order entry time dropped from up to 2 hours per order to roughly 5 minutes—without changing a single customer process or internal workflow. Accuracy hit approximately 90% on handwritten orders and nearly 100% on typed inputs. The entire solution, from kickoff to an ERP-integrated prototype, was delivered in weeks, not months. And once fully implemented, the agent is projected to cost just 3 to 20 cents per order or roughly $20 per month at their current volume. That cost represents the total technology investment required. No big software investments. No big hosting bills.  

Just as important as the speed gains and cost efficiency: nothing broke. GIC’s customers still work the way they prefer. The ERP is unchanged. The team didn’t need to learn a new platform. The agent simply absorbed the complexity that had always existed—and handled it. Also important for the GIC team, their agent has taken the tedium out of order entry. GIC can now spend more time helping customers and less time typing. 

What changed

  • Manual order entry reduced from up to 2 hours per order to roughly 5 minutes with human-in-the-loop review
  • Customers continued submitting orders via handwritten notes, PDFs, emails, photos, and scanned documents—without changing a single process
  • A 20-year-old ERP remained fully intact while agentic AI handled the complexity around it
  • Order processing capacity more than doubled, allowing the team to focus on customer relationships instead of data entry
  • GIC established a scalable model for applying agentic AI to additional workflows, including compliance and operational processes

What’s next

With order entry running smoothly, GIC is now exploring how agentic AI can support compliance-related workflows, the next frontier in a broader AI adoption roadmap built on GIC’s terms, timeline, and values. GIC now sees these agents as layers that can streamline one process after another—without replacing the systems they rely on. 

Building with cars parked outside

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