The corrugated and folding carton industry isn’t known for speed. Quotes can take days. Estimating depends on internal handoffs. And sales teams often lose deals before pricing ever lands in a customer’s inbox.

Pakked believes that’s no longer acceptable.

The packaging tech startup has launched Maverick AI, positioning it as the industry’s first AI-powered estimating chatbot built specifically for corrugated and folding carton manufacturers. The product is designed to overhaul front-end sales workflows—cutting quote times from days to minutes while improving accuracy, consistency, and customer experience.

It’s a focused application of AI to a problem that’s plagued packaging manufacturers for decades: estimating friction.

Built by Insiders Who Know the Pain

Pakked’s credibility starts with its origin story.

Founded in 2023 by brothers Philip and Wesley Webb, the company is led by third-generation packaging operators who grew up inside box plants. Their family previously owned and operated Fleetwood-Fibre Packaging & Graphics in Southern California, giving the founders firsthand exposure to the inefficiencies that define traditional estimating processes.

Those experiences shaped Maverick’s development over the past 18+ months. Rather than retrofitting generic sales software, Pakked built a tool tailored to how packaging estimates actually work—materials, colors, quantities, CAD files, and constant revisions.

“The corrugated industry is ready for a change,” said Philip Webb, co-founder of Pakked. “Pakked is modernizing the front-end sales process for manufacturers while improving the customer experience through faster response times and technology built for today’s expectations—not yesterday’s systems.”

Maverick AI: A Digital Estimating Teammate

Maverick functions less like a form and more like a conversational coworker.

Sales and estimating teams can interact with the chatbot in natural language—running internal estimates, adjusting quantities, changing colors, creating multiple pricing scenarios, and refining details in real time. Instead of restarting the estimating process with every revision, teams iterate instantly.

Once finalized, Maverick generates fully branded quotes that can be downloaded or shared with customers within minutes. The experience mirrors how sales teams already think and communicate, but without the delays imposed by legacy systems.

This conversational approach reflects a broader MarTech trend: AI agents replacing rigid workflows with adaptive, context-aware interactions—especially in industries that have historically relied on manual processes.

Fixing the Quote-to-Hit Rate Problem

Speed is only part of the story.

In corrugated packaging, quote-to-hit rates typically fall below 20%, a figure that underscores how many opportunities die due to slow responses and internal bottlenecks. By the time a quote arrives, customers have often moved on.

Maverick directly targets that failure point. Unlike traditional estimating systems that depend on departmental availability and sequential handoffs, Maverick works 24/7, generating estimates instantly without waiting for internal responses.

By eliminating operational noise and hidden costs tied to manual workflows, Pakked argues Maverick can help manufacturers respond faster, reduce friction between teams, and capture opportunities that would otherwise be lost.

Trained on Each Plant’s Own Data

One of Maverick’s most important design choices is customization.

Each deployment is trained on a manufacturer’s own internal data and configured specifically for that box plant. That approach avoids the “one-size-fits-all” problem common in horizontal AI tools and helps ensure accuracy in highly variable production environments.

In testing, Pakked reports Maverick achieved up to 99.3% accuracy when benchmarked against existing legacy estimating systems currently in use across the industry.

For manufacturers wary of AI-driven pricing errors, that figure matters. Accuracy isn’t just a technical metric—it’s a trust requirement.

More Than Estimating: A Workflow Hub

Maverick AI also serves as the central hub of the broader Pakked platform.

The system brings together estimate requests, CAD files, artwork, and approvals into a single workflow, reducing the need to juggle email threads, shared drives, and disconnected tools.

Pakked is working toward enabling customers to place orders directly from approved quotes—a move that would extend automation beyond estimating and into the full order lifecycle.

If executed well, that could shift packaging sales from a fragmented, back-and-forth process to a more continuous, digital experience.

Why This Matters Now

Packaging manufacturers face increasing pressure from faster-moving competitors, rising customer expectations, and tighter margins. In that environment, front-end efficiency isn’t just an operational issue—it’s a growth lever.

Maverick AI reflects a growing pattern across industrial and B2B sectors: AI isn’t being used to replace craftsmanship, but to remove friction around it. By modernizing estimating—a historically slow and opaque process—Pakked is betting that speed, clarity, and responsiveness will become competitive advantages in a traditionally conservative industry.

For corrugated and folding carton manufacturers, that could mark the beginning of a long-overdue shift from manual bottlenecks to AI-assisted sales execution. 

Get in touch with our MarTech Experts.