Let me say first that you provide a great service and although I have never had one of your kits myself I think the many folk that have who testament to them says enough.
As it was not viable due to the ocean between us and ridiculous postage costs upon which you have no control, I was not able to purchase from you earlier this year. But you were gracious in taking your time to reply to my enquiry at the time.
This left me with sourcing capacitors for a number of radio's which I have posted about on this forum. Rather than repeat the detail here that thread is and the post in particular is
AI the good, bad & ugly CAPS .
Suffice to say there is another thread regarding AI also which documents some frustrations and some solutions or ways of thinking when approaching AI.
First thing is to determine if you were using Gemini (Google AI) as part of a paid subscription specifically enhancing the AI experience or just the out the box AI experience?
Next would be understanding the ground rules you set Gemini to T it up for the task you set it, is that something you could share?
Further to that would understanding the prompts you used along your journey?
Suffice to say when approached and implemented well AI can be very useful and was very useful when I wanted to collate my BOM and upload to supplier.
I think it comes down to necessity (being the Mother of Invention, Afterall). If you want to make your commercial aspect a little leaner, maybe make a little more and even pass on some reductions to buyers then it might all be around the upfront work to get the AI process slick enough to work to that end. Also has to be said that very little that's good or great is free, so paying for better AI to do more complex tasks to benefit your business may or may not make sense.
That's a key aspect is right there! the upfront work, repeatable, designed to be improved easily and potentially working across multiple suppliers. You're also going to have to consider the source material (the service manuals etc.) are they good readable clean OCR or just pdf pictures of jpg's and the like! the source material needs to be AI readable and thats not free (for the good stuff that is) and if its poor then your going to get poor output. Fixing the documents with paid for AI services that can actually give you better readable data probably comes before anything.
As was said in that other thread G.I.G.O.
Its a chore to setup but if you do it correctly and put in the initial time its occasionally worth it.
What I would say lastly is you could be able to drop one of the 4 human aspects you mentioned
"pick/order/package/ship" order! if the AI works for you. But the other 3 probably aren't worth the effort for the quantities and cost in your model (hazarding a guess there, no offence intended).
