Forging a Future: How AI Reshapes Metal Procurement

The global metals market is projected to grow from USD 4.23 trillion in 2025 to USD 4.97 trillion by 2029, fuelled by rising demand from cleantech, infrastructure, and electronics. At the same time, base-metal inventories are tightening, with London Metal Exchange zinc and aluminium stocks at multi-year lows. In this context, speed and accuracy in procurement have become critical.

To address these pressures, Enlight Metals has deployed a 24×7 conversational AI “digital colleague” that handles customer queries, accelerates quoting, and modernises interactions. The initiative reflects how Industry 5.0 is evolving through the partnership of human expertise and intelligent systems.

According to Dhananjay Goel, Director, Enlight Metals, this AI-driven approach has cut response times by more than 60%, transforming the procurement process and reshaping the customer experience in the new Industry 5.0 era.

Enlight recently announced the integration of conversational AI for metal procurement. What was the core problem you were trying to solve, and how does AI fit into that journey?

In the metals business, every second matters. The first company to respond with a clear, competitive offer usually wins the order. Before AI, we were losing valuable hours—sometimes even days—just capturing basic information from incoming inquiries, verifying specifications, and following up for missing details.

We realised that if we could automate the initial layers of interaction without compromising personal rapport, we could change the game. Conversational AI became that solution. It integrates seamlessly with multiple touchpoints—whether an inquiry comes via WhatsApp, our website, or over the phone. The AI captures the requirement instantly, asks the right follow-up questions if something is missing, and ensures only qualified, complete leads reach our sales team.

With AI co-pilots managing inquiries and drafting quotes, Enlight Metals has cut response times by 60%, proving how human judgement and machine efficiency can coexist in Industry 5.0.

The biggest win is consistency and speed. We now have what I call a “24×7 digital colleague” who never gets tired, never forgets, and never misses a lead, allowing our people to focus on value-driven work rather than administrative loops.

Industry 5.0 is all about human–machine collaboration. How is your AI solution designed to work with your procurement teams or customers—not just replace them?

Our philosophy is clear: AI is here to amplify human capability, not replace it. In our setup, the AI acts as a co-pilot. It handles repetitive tasks—recording precise specifications, matching them to our supplier database, drafting initial quotations, and flagging potential best-fit vendors.

This frees up our teams to focus on what humans do best: building trust, negotiating terms, understanding nuanced client needs, and making judgment calls that go beyond data points. Every quote, price commitment, and delivery promise still has a human sign-off.

This balance ensures two things: speed, because AI does the heavy lifting instantly; and credibility, because final decisions always have a human stamp. It’s a partnership where technology drives efficiency and humans preserve the trust factor.

Enlight Metals is not a tech or IT company in the traditional sense. What motivated your team to adopt AI-first thinking in a domain like industrial metal aggregation?

Industrial metal aggregation has not seen much digital disruption. For decades, it has been built around phone calls, handwritten notes, manual ledgers, and physical follow-ups. That works locally, but if you want to operate at PAN-India scale with dozens of product categories and hundreds of suppliers, the old methods hit a wall quickly.

We took an honest look at our growth ambitions and realised that the traditional approach would not take us where we wanted to go. AI-first thinking was not about chasing the latest tech trend; it was about building the foundation for a future-ready metals supply chain.

By adopting AI, we could shorten decision cycles, remove inefficiencies, and help our teams focus on high-value problem-solving instead of administrative tasks. In many ways, we are setting a precedent for how an old-world industry can reinvent itself and compete on a modern playing field.

Can you walk us through a typical AI-powered interaction—for example, how a customer or partner might use the conversational interface to place or manage orders?

Picture this: a customer sends us a message on WhatsApp saying they need 100 tonnes of HR coils of a particular thickness and grade. In the past, this would trigger a chain of back-and-forth calls or emails—first to confirm dimensions, then to check stock availability, then to source supplier quotes—often taking two to three days.

Now, the AI kicks in immediately. It understands the requirement, prompts the customer for missing details, and routes the complete request to our sales team within minutes. Once the sales team approves, the AI’s procurement module scans our supplier database, identifies the best matches, prepares a draft quotation, and sends it for human verification.

Within a few hours—sometimes even the same morning—the customer has a verified quote in their inbox or WhatsApp. Throughout the process, both our team and the customer have complete visibility of the status. It’s speed and transparency rolled into one.

What kind of impact have you observed so far in terms of efficiency, response time, human workload, or client satisfaction?

The results have been very encouraging. Our average response time to qualified inquiries has dropped by more than 60%, which is a significant competitive advantage in metals trading. Lead-to-quote cycles that previously took two or three days now often finish in less than 24 hours.

From a workload perspective, our teams have seen over a one-third reduction in repetitive administrative work. This means they can handle more opportunities without burning out—effectively increasing our sales capacity without adding headcount.

From WhatsApp to web forms, Enlight Metals’ 24×7 conversational AI transforms raw inquiries into verified leads, freeing humans to focus on trust, negotiation, and strategy.

On the client side, faster and more accurate quotes naturally lead to higher conversion rates. Customers feel they are dealing with a company that respects their time and operates with precision, which strengthens long-term relationships.

How have your internal teams responded to this shift? Did it require reskilling or a change in workflows?

Any change in workflow requires some adaptation, and AI was no different. We restructured certain processes so that AI outputs became the starting point for human work rather than the other way around. This meant conducting short, focused training sessions to help teams interpret and act on AI-generated insights effectively.

The adoption curve was surprisingly short because the benefits were visible from day one. People saw how much time they were saving, how many fewer follow-ups they had to chase, and how much more headspace they had for strategic discussions. Instead of fear or resistance, there was genuine excitement.

Trust and transparency are key in B2B supply chains. How do you ensure that AI-driven interactions maintain reliability and relationship-building?

In our business, trust is as valuable as the metal we trade. That’s why we have built strict guardrails into our AI systems. No quote generated by AI is ever sent to a client without human review and approval.

We also maintain complete audit trails—every interaction, data point, and quote is logged and accessible to both internal teams and, where relevant, customers and suppliers. This shared visibility removes ambiguity and builds confidence.

The AI might be invisible to the customer, but the speed and accuracy they experience are backed by our commitment to accountability at every stage.

What’s next for Enlight Metals in its Industry 5.0 journey?

The journey is just beginning. We are working on AI-driven pricing intelligence that can respond to market shifts in real time, enabling us to adjust offers within hours instead of days.

On the logistics side, we are developing AI-enabled tracking to give customers a live view of their shipments down to estimated arrival times and route progress. For sustainability, we are exploring tools that can measure and report the carbon footprint per order, helping both us and our clients meet evolving compliance norms.

Our vision is an end-to-end intelligent supply chain where every stage, from inquiry to delivery, is transparent, efficient, and environmentally conscious.

For other traditional industries considering AI, what advice would you give?

Forget the hype and focus on the pain point. Don’t start with “We want AI”—start with “We need to solve this specific problem.” In our case, it was wasted hours on unqualified inquiries.

Pick one problem that directly impacts customer satisfaction or your bottom line. Solve it well, show quick results, and make sure your team sees those wins firsthand. Keep human oversight in the loop to build trust and confidence in the system. Once you have proven the value, scaling AI to other areas becomes a natural next step.

Lastly, do you see Enlight Metals emerging as a digital leader within the industrial supply chain ecosystem?

Yes, and we are building toward it very deliberately. We have moved from being a company that uses digital tools to one that thinks digitally. Our operations are becoming data-first, workflows are redesigned for automation, and our people are trained to work seamlessly with advanced tools.

We are not simply transferring old processes into a digital format—we are reimagining them entirely for speed, scalability, and sustainability. In the next decade, digital-first operations will be the baseline in our industry. We intend to be remembered as the company that proved metals could be traded faster, more transparently, and more responsibly at a national scale.

aanchalg@cybermedia.co.in