Applied AI studio · industrial · manufacturing · trades
Inconel is an applied-AI studio for the people who build, fix, and make things — machine shops, fabricators, manufacturers, and home-services operators. We embed with one shop at a time, find the place AI moves real money, and ship it.
Two decades delivering for Fortune 500 manufacturers and industrial operators — now building for the shops that supply them.
What we do
Most AI for the trades is a demo that never touches the work. We do the opposite — find the leak, build the fix, and prove it on your floor.
We sit in your office, watch the work, and find the one place AI moves real money — before a line of code. You get a sharp problem statement and an honest read on whether it is worth building.
Working software, not slideware. Quoting engines, intake agents, follow-up machines — grounded in your catalog, your pricing, your history. Real math under the hood, never a black box.
We run with one shop at a time as a design partner, instrument everything, and earn trust before we scale. You stay in control; the model proves itself against your own numbers.
The work
The studio reinvests its own research into products aimed at the leakiest workflows in industry. Each starts as a design-partner engagement, not a launch.
Early access — talk to us
The front desk that never sleeps.
An always-on AI front desk for home-services operators. It answers every call and text around the clock, qualifies the lead, books the estimate, and chases every stalled quote — so no job ever goes cold because the phone rang while the crew was on a job.
RFQ to draft quote in minutes.
A quoting engine for custom manufacturing. Inbound RFQs — emails, PDF prints, spreadsheet BOMs — become structured draft quotes in minutes instead of days. A transparent cost build-up you can edit, calibrated to a shop’s own closed jobs. Built for CNC shops and metal fabricators.
How we work
Inconel is a nickel-chromium superalloy that holds up where ordinary metal fails — heat, pressure, corrosion. We named the studio after it on purpose. The same four rules govern everything we ship.
Anything that talks to a customer is built to flag, escalate, and log — never to silently drop the ball. A missed handoff is the worst class of bug, so we make it impossible to hide one.
Every number on screen traces back to an input you can see and edit. We build deterministic cores you can trust and audit, with AI where it actually helps — not a confident guess wrapped in a chat box.
The per-shop logic is configuration — your catalog, your pricing rules, your job history. One engine, adapted to you. We don’t hard-code your business into a product you can’t change.
We calibrate against your own closed jobs and prove the model reproduces your numbers before you bet on it. One design partner, measured honestly, beats ten logos on a slide.
About
Inconel is the practice of Tim Raftis. For more than fifteen years he’s built and shipped software inside and alongside Fortune 500 manufacturers and industrial operators — the kind of environments where a wrong number on a quote or a dropped order has real consequences.
That work made one thing obvious: the shops that supply the Fortune 500 — the machine shops, fabricators, and trades — run on the same hard problems with none of the tooling. Inconel exists to close that gap, one shop at a time.
Tim Raftis
Founder · Inconel
Previously at
We’ll find out together. Book a short call — if there’s nothing worth building yet, we’ll tell you straight.