Your product knowledge shouldn’t depend on one application engineer’s calendar
Rapidflare gives manufacturers a product selection experience that behaves like a sales engineer: understanding a high-level use case, asking the right technical questions, and arriving at a part number with the reasoning shown.
Parametric search only answers the easy question
It works when the customer already knows the parameters. It goes silent the moment someone describes an application instead of a spec, and that’s exactly where the hard questions live. Someone at your company can already answer almost any of those; there’s just one of them, and every inquiry queues behind the same few people.
- "I need a component with these specific parameters." Your existing product selector handles this well.
- "I’m designing an automotive infotainment system. What should I use?" Nothing on your site can answer this. It requires contextual technical reasoning.
- So the customer opens a ticket, emails a rep, or fills in a contact form and waits.
- Your product catalog holds a subset of the technical knowledge that lives in datasheets, application notes and reference designs, which can get complex.
- Answering properly means pulling in a sales engineer, an application engineer or a product specialist.
- Long-tail customers never get that attention at all, so the design win goes to whoever answered first.
Rapidflare asks the clarifying questions a senior application engineer would ask, then narrows thousands of products down to the ones that fit.
Guided product selection
From a described use case to a specific part number, with the reasoning attached.
When the answer depends on a diagram buried in a PDF, our Visual Reasoning Engine reads the diagram itself, not just the surrounding text.
Technical support
Register maps, pinouts, power sequencing, SDK integration, errata, hardware and software bring-up: the questions your FAEs answer on repeat, already documented somewhere, just scattered across datasheets, forums, and past tickets.
Deployed on your docs site, in your developer community, or inside your product. In the AMD ROCm Discord and Discourse community it cut L1 support requests by more than 30%.
Channel and partner enablement
Point the same agent at your distributors, channel partners and resellers, so a partner answers for your products instead of defaulting to whichever line they know best.
One live example: a manufacturer’s agents running inside a distributor’s own sales team, day to day, answering questions their reps would otherwise escalate back to the factory.
Competitive comparison and cross-reference
Customers ask this unprompted. In live conversation logs, we see queries like “What’s your equivalent to this competitor’s part?”, matched spec by spec against your own catalog.
The same capability lets your own reps defend a socket without waiting for a competitive analysis.
Technical proposals
Once the parts are selected, the agent assembles the technical recommendation the customer can act on, built from your own documentation rather than a template.
Three ways manufacturers deploy it
Internal enablement
Your own sales, application engineering, product and support teams: behind SSO, with access to internal and pre-release material the public agent never sees. Available in Slack and Teams.
Partner enablement
Provided to your distributors, channel partners and resellers so they can sell your products with the technical depth of your own team.
Website and long-tail customers
Deployed on your public site and in the site search bar, so long-tail customers get a real answer instead of nothing. Live on Taoglas and Qorvo’s sites; Critical Link runs it in search.
What moves
AMD’s numbers below come from a fourth surface running alongside the three models above: the ROCm Discord and Discourse developer community, plus docs and blog widgets embedded across its site.
AMD started in shadow mode: two weeks running against real Discord and forum questions, reviewed through an admin dashboard, before anything went live. It then expanded by surface, guided selection for embedded and FPGA, support agents for FPGA and x86 embedded processors behind single sign-on, and the ROCm developer community. See customer stories →
Common questions from manufacturers
We already have a parametric product selector. Why add this?
Parametric search is a filter: it needs the customer to already know the parameters. Rapidflare handles the case where the customer knows their application but not the specification, which is the inquiry that currently goes to an application engineer. The two work together: most customers who can use your existing selector should keep using it.
What if our product catalog doesn’t contain everything in our datasheets?
That is the normal starting position. We ingest the datasheets, application notes, reference designs and support history alongside the catalog, and structure all of it into one knowledge graph, so the agent can reason over material that was never in the PIM.
What about specifications that only exist inside diagrams?
Conventional retrieval flattens documents into text at ingestion and discards the diagrams, which means specifications inside schematics, timing charts and mechanical drawings never reach retrieval at all. Our Visual Reasoning Engine reconstructs and indexes those visuals so the agent can reason over them directly.
How do we know it is not making things up?
Every output is traceable to the document it came from, so your engineers can open the source and check. Beyond that, we run a practical evaluation framework against real traffic, and we typically start customers in a shadow mode where the team reviews responses before anything is exposed.
Can our channel partners use it?
Yes. You can provision the agent to distributors and resellers so they answer for your products with your technical depth, which directly affects whether a partner leads with your line or someone else’s.
See it on your own products
Send us your public documentation and we’ll build a working selection agent on your catalog before the first call.
SOC 2 Type II · Every answer traceable to its source