Say it's nine days. Walk through them and most of it isn't work — it's waiting. Waiting on a site visit. Waiting on a supplier price. Waiting for the one person who knows the real margin to get off another job and look. The actual estimating might be two or three hours.
This matters because people try to speed up the wrong part. They buy software to make the two hours of estimating faster, then wonder why the quote still takes nine days. The bottleneck was never the maths.
AI's biggest lever in a quote isn't calculation — it's killing the wait. Drafting the moment a price lands. Flagging the job that's been sat untouched for three days. Assembling the document so the only human step left is the judgement call. Fix the queue, not the calculator.
It's an unglamorous truth, but it's where the days actually go. Map the waiting before you automate anything, and the win is usually hiding in plain sight.