Threekit announced on October 1, 2026 the launch of AI-Native CPQ—a configure-price-quote platform built for how manufacturers and B2B sellers actually sell today. The Chicago company is led by the team behind BigMachines (now Oracle CPQ) and SteelBrick (now Salesforce CPQ), and frames the release as a ground-up restart: conversational on the front end, still governed by the manufacturer’s catalog, pricing, and business rules underneath.
Legacy CPQ assumed the user already knew the exact SKU path. Threekit’s bet is the opposite. Reps, dealers, and buyers describe the job—spec sheets, photos, voice notes, RFPs, or plain project language—and the system runs needs analysis, recommends a solution, and validates it against product and commercial rules before a quote leaves the building. CEO Matt Gorniak’s line is blunt: traditional CPQ breaks because most buyers and sellers do not already know what to order.
The same intelligence can run as a web AI sales agent on the manufacturer’s site—not a static catalog or dead-end lead form. One leading window and door manufacturer doubled leads after launching a Threekit-powered buying experience online. A leading commercial plumbing manufacturer now produces quotes four times faster. That is CPQ moving from internal order entry to customer-facing guided selling without discarding catalog governance.
Trust markers matter in industrial sales: Threekit cites more than 150 live manufacturers, including Bobcat, Owens Corning, Steelcase, Fortune Brands, Assa Abloy, and A-dec. A 2024 McKinsey B2B Pulse Survey of 4,000 decision makers still hangs over the category—more than half said they would turn elsewhere without a smooth cross-channel experience. Conversational CPQ is Threekit’s answer to that friction: solve the application first, then lock a valid config and price.
For manufacturers, the commercial loop is still incomplete if CPQ floats apart from product definition and change control. An AI agent that quotes a variant the vault never released is just a faster wrong answer. That is the ask-to-bid gap industrial CRM keeps rediscovering when sales tools ignore the product system of record.
For N23D, Threekit’s launch is another vendor proof that configure-price-quote only works when commercial rules stay tied to owned product truth. N23D targets that as a single native Rust binary: local-first CRM beside flowchart BUS and vaulted PLM you control when the CPQ cloud SKU or seat clock changes.