Ordana is the AI order desk for wholesale distributors. We take inbound orders and customer inquiries across phone, email, fax, PDF, SMS and WhatsApp, resolve them the way an experienced CSR would, and hand clean orders to your ERP in the format your team already works with.

The order desk has been the least-automated function in most distribution businesses for good reason. Real orders are messy. Customers ask for “a case of the usual.” Handwritten fax orders don’t map cleanly to SKUs. Half the resolution lives in the head of the CSR who has been there 20 years. Until recently, that complexity was outside what AI could handle. The last 18 months changed that.

What we do specifically:

Read orders from every channel in every format, including handwritten pages, voicemails and photos
Understand your product catalog and how each customer likes to order (item numbers only, “usual,” seasonal SKUs, unit vs case, brand substitutions)
Resolve out-of-stocks, substitutions and ambiguities on the customer’s behalf, escalating to a human with full context when needed
Push clean orders into any ERP through APIs, files, or the workflows you already have

We are US-based and founder-led. Prior to Ordana, our founder ran an Amazon-backed voice commerce company that powered Alexa’s shopping engine. Conversational commerce at complex-catalog scale is what our team has been building for a decade. Ordana is backed by category-focused investors and scales deliberately: one vertical at a time, one deployment at a time, treated as a partnership rather than a transaction.

Deployments so far span foodservice broadline, specialty grocery, beverage, and HVAC. Results include order-entry error rates cut by 80%, after-hours phone orders taken autonomously, and reps redeployed from typing recurring orders into growing accounts.

What we believe about the next five years:

AI will separate distributors who use it to redeploy their people from those who use it to shrink. The winners will keep their reps and put them into work that customers actually feel: growing accounts, resolving complex situations, deepening manufacturer relationships. Everything repeatable will move to agents. The transition is technical, but the harder part is organizational, and it works best when leadership treats it as a workforce strategy rather than an IT project.

We’re glad to be part of the NAW community and look forward to comparing notes with member executives thinking through where AI genuinely fits in the order-to-cash flow.

Contact: Shilp Agarwal, Founder & CEO | [email protected] | ordana.ai