We gave users a confidence score on AI pricing answers. They ignored it and asked for the receipts.

We're building a pricing agent for a B2B sales team. The problem is simple: when a rep needs a ballpark price, they wait 1–3 days for a supplier quote. The agent is meant to give that number in seconds. V2 covered what V1 was missing: sell price, lease price, freight flags, and a confidence score on every answer. We demoed it to about 20 users. Then the fun part: nobody cared about the confidence score. The first question was about a specific example. A rep looked at a price and said, "That's not right." Not "the score is low." Just "I don't believe this number." Then came the request that shaped everything after it: show me the orders this came from. That makes sense once you think about how reps actually work: A confidence score is the model's measure of how much it trusts itself. That's not the same as the rep trusting the answer. A rep putting a price in front of a customer needs to defend it. "The AI was 87% sure" isn't a defense. "We sold the same item at this price in March" is. If you can't see where a number came from, you can't catch a wrong one. And there was one: during the demo, the agent showed a list price of $126, while the source data showed $134. A small miss, but it's exactly the kind a rep only catches when the source is right there. Another useful takeaway from the session was learning where users actually want the tool. It's great for quick internal checks on specific items. It's not something they'd use for contract pricing or for budgeting a whole project with no specs. That's fine. A tool that does one thing people trust beats one that does five things nobody uses. What I'd tell anyone building internal agents that give numbers people have to stand behind: Show the sources before you add a score. Users trust things they can check. Demo to skeptical people, not just the champion. One doubtful rep taught us more than a week of internal QA. Pin down the job early. "Instant ballpark for internal checks" and "quote-ready pricing" are different products. People don't trust a number because the model says it's confident. They trust it because they can see where it came from.