An answer to every forking question
I need a forklift, which brand is the best?
What do I need to know before I talk to a sales rep?
Will a three-stage mast clear a standard container doorway?
The problem
AFH Forklifts has sold and serviced material handling equipment for decades. Everything from one machine for a sole trader to big fleets for some of the country’s largest logistics operators. Every sale starts with questions, and they come from pneumatic tyre-kickers right through to seasoned operators who already know the exact spec they’re after.
The wrong forklift is an expensive thing to discover. A machine that can’t turn in your aisle width or clear a container door isn’t a quick fix. AFH needed a system that gives every potential buyer something genuinely useful, the all-important feeling of being informed, while moving them toward the one thing that actually closes a forklift sale: a real person.
The system
We built a sales assistant grounded in AFH’s own experience, speaking in the brand’s voice. It draws on a tiered knowledge base built from real conversations with the AFH sales team. It qualifies the way a good salesperson does. It asks what you’re lifting and how high, not what capacity you think you need, because customers know their loads, not forklift specs. From there it steers you toward the right machine and the right person.
Knowing its own load rating
The clever part isn’t what it answers. It’s what it won’t. Ask it a price and it hands you to the sales team. Ask what’s in stock and it does the same, because stock moves hourly and a confident guess is worse than no information at all. Plenty of chatbots will very happily sell you the wrong forklift. This one knows when to pass you to a human, which in a sales conversation is the most important thing.
And if you’re wondering whether you can take your new forklift for a drive on a public road, best you ask here first.
AFH RAG by the numbers
- 2,223 hand-authored question phrasings
- 189 corpus documents across four knowledge tiers.
- 88,000 words of enriched content.
- 94 verified Q&A documents: 74 built from elicitation sessions with the AFH sales team, 20 covering operator knowledge, safety, and compliance.
- 45 product overviews and 50 brochure and specification documents, spanning Yale, Jungheinrich, TCM, and UN machines from 1.0 to 10.0 tonne.
- 49 official manufacturer brochures and spec sheets linked for direct retrieval.
- 19-field YAML metadata schema on every document, extended to 20 on product documents carrying a linked brochure.
- 143 documents (76%) carry a defined human escalation route.
Quick answers
What is a RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) assistant?
It’s an AI assistant that answers from a knowledge base you control, rather than from whatever it picked up in training. It retrieves the relevant approved material first, then writes the answer from that. For the AFH build, every response traces back to the company’s own product knowledge and the way its sales team actually talks, not to general knowledge about forklifts.
Can an AI assistant help a customer choose the right product?
Yes, when it’s built to qualify rather than just answer. The AFH assistant asks what you’re lifting and how high, the way a good salesperson would, because most buyers know their loads but not forklift specifications. From there it narrows the options and points you toward the right machine and the right person, instead of leaving you to guess.
How do you stop an AI sales assistant giving wrong prices or specs?
You decide what it won’t answer. Prices and stock change, so the AFH assistant doesn’t guess at them, it hands you straight to the sales team. Product information comes from an approved knowledge base rather than the model’s memory, so it isn’t inventing specifications to fill a gap. On something like a load rating or a mast height, a confident guess is worse than no answer.
Can an AI assistant serve up the right brochure for an enquiry?
Yes. Alongside its written answers, the AFH assistant links to the specific brochure that matches what you’re asking about, so a question about a particular reach truck brings up that machine’s brochure rather than a generic catalogue. The brochures sit in the knowledge base as their own tier, tagged and linked to the product answers, so the right document arrives with the right question. It’s the difference between being told about a forklift and being handed the spec sheet for it.
Does an AI assistant replace your sales team?
No, it feeds them. The assistant does the early groundwork, answering the common questions and qualifying the enquiry, then hands over a buyer who already knows roughly what they need. The close still belongs to a person. What changes is that the sales team spends its time on conversations that are ready to have.
Linkki builds BrandRAG systems: branded, retrieval-first AI assistants built on structured, verified source material, with strict guardrails and continuous auditing.
