Partsnow.AI is bringing the technological innovation and user experience benefits of AI to the sometimes difficult world of finding truck parts.
Launched in March, the new website melds agentic AI and a robust parts catalog database with leading e-commerce capabilities to help users to source and order parts from across the commercial trucking spectrum.
Founded jointly by Steve Fultz, owner of Knox Post Trailer Companies, a Tennessee-based service operation, and Manna Justin, CEO of TalkRev and long-time tech developer, the pair see PartsNow as the next step in adapting artificial intelligence to power parts procurement. Fultz says PartsNow doesn’t exist to replace a veteran counterperson or sales associate but enhance their capabilities. To bring new associates online faster, ease the challenges that come with open parts positions and, importantly, serve customers who are increasingly searching for their next part off hours or online.
“A guy working after hours doesn’t want to wait until 9 the next morning to call for a part,” Justin says. “This is a solution that works for them.”
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As the duo shared with Overdrive (owned by Fusable, parent company of TPS), PartsNow.AI essentially functions as an inclusive, multi-faceted AI communication device plugged into one of the largest parts attributes databases around. Users input parts information via text, voice or images, and the system analyzes the information and presents a selection of likely components to fit the user’s need. From there, users can enhance their query, request more information, consider related components and place an order.
Longtime friends, Fultz and Justin have pondered a potential of an AI-powered parts tool for years. Investment in the idea scaled up in recent years, and over the last 12 months, TalkRev’s development team built the platform, scraping product data from all available supplier resources (including scanning and integrating print catalogs), the Knox Post parts inventory database, and leveraging Fultz’s supplier relationships to build out the model.
Ongoing automated testing occurred throughout the development, and as the site neared completion, was augmented with human testing.
“I don’t think it made one mistake” during that period, Justin says.
The model continuously learns too, integrating customer interactions into its knowledge base to further enhance its parts identification and recognition capabilities.
Fultz admits a good counterperson does that as well, but they also take sick days, vacations and rarely work weekends. They also can retire or take a new job at any time.
PartsNow has none of those limitations. Justin describes the 24/7 solution as the most dedicated, informed counterperson a distributor could ever have, who never takes breaks, makes mistakes or fails to respond to a customer request. Even PartsNow’s agentic voice AI help line can serve up to 50 customers instantaneously, speaking with any language or accent a user requires.
And the duo are eager to roll the solution out across the trucking space. The use case for a truck owner searching for a part are obvious, but Fultz also believes PartsNow could be revolutionary in the distribution sector.
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“With PartsNow, we can sell everybody’s parts,” he says.
The pair envision a future where distributors from across the country — and possibly the world — are plugged into the PartsNow database, meaning a customer’s parts request and order is fulfilled from the site’s closest participating warehouse with the part in stock.
Justin also notes his team has the capability of rolling out a distributor-specific PartsNow website in “less than a week,” nearly eliminating the scale-up time that delays so many e-commerce launches. Justin says the latter would require a setup fee, but the former would rely on a commission-based pricing structure he’s refined across many verticals.
He also notes the distributor-branded website would enable the distributor to include pricing matrices, custom shipping parameters and more.
“The system can handle all sorts of these things,” Justin says.
But Fultz also recognizes the adoption concerns e-commerce and especially AI have across the distribution space.
“Everyone is like, ‘I know this is taking over but I’m scared,’” Fultz says. “I get their concerns, and we want to help them, because they know they need to get into this game.”
Beyond promoting the site to buyers, he says educating distributors about AI its potential to revolutionize their business is a big part of his current efforts. He stresses AI isn’t about removing experienced professionals, it’s about enhancing them. Making every aspect of a distributor’s customer-facing team more capable, and reliable.
“It’s hard to beat data that’s never wrong and never calls in sick,” he says.
