Prox

Every product ever sold needs support at some point. That support falls into one of two buckets.

Bucket 1: Simple stuff. T-shirts, screen protectors, keyboards. You buy it, it shows up, maybe you ask “where's my order?” once. This is solved. Zendesk and a hundred other horizontal companies solved it.

Bucket 2: Hard stuff. $20,000 industrial heaters. HVAC systems. CNC machines. Car parts. Products where buying wrong means your building doesn't have heat or your manufacturing line is down. Support for these products can only be performed by highly trained domain specialists and there aren't enough of them.

If you're selling EV charging stations, your support person needs to be a certified electrician who understands local power grids, installation codes, and compatibility matrices. You can't hire this off the street. You can't outsource it overseas.

You'd think LLMs would have solved this by now. They haven't. Three years into the LLM era, penetration in this industry is very low & the reason is twofold.

First, off-the-shelf models don't actually understand these products. The knowledge lives in 48-page technical manuals buried on some manufacturer's website in terrible formatting — wiring schematics, compatibility matrices, installation diagrams that can only make sense visually. A general-purpose LLM can't draw you the diagram showing how to connect terminal A to terminal B. It doesn't have the spatial understanding or the product-specific reasoning to be a real technical advisor. So companies still rely entirely on human experts.

Second, even if the models were good enough, there are no harnesses to make them useful in the business.