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Tech Transformation with Evan Kirstel: A podcast exploring the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry, and how businesses can leverage them for growth, diving into the world of B2B, discussing strategies, trends, and sharing insights from industry leaders!
With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Cloud, Telecom, 5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
AI-Driven Success: Responsive on Transforming RFP Management, Streamlining Business Processes, and the Future of AI-Enhanced Information Exchange
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
Unlock the secrets to transforming your business's response process with our special guest, Ganesh Shankar, co-founder and CEO of Responsive. Discover how AI is revolutionizing the management of RFPs, RFIs, and various questionnaires. Ganesh takes us behind the scenes, sharing the personal journeys that spurred the creation of Responsive. Learn how their innovative platform leverages artificial intelligence to streamline and automate the response process, helping businesses save valuable time and avoid costly disqualifications. With nearly 2,000 customers, including 25 Fortune 100 companies, Responsive has proven to be a game-changer in the market since its inception in 2015.
Curious about the evolution of AI and its impact on content creation? Ganesh breaks it all down, from traditional machine learning to the advanced generative AI we see today. Hear about the proprietary algorithms and large language models that power Responsive, ensuring your business's responses are accurate and insightful. We also cover the crucial balance between automation and personalization, and the methods used to prevent AI hallucinations while ensuring thorough human review. Gain insights into Responsive's vision for a unified, compliant, and collaborative information exchange between buyers and sellers, and get a sneak peek into their future growth plans, including exciting new hires. Don't miss this insightful conversation on the cutting edge of AI-driven response management!
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Hey everybody, really interesting chat today in the domain of AI-driven RFP responses with Responsive Ganesh. How are you?
Speaker 2:Good Evan. First of all, thanks for having me on your show. Super excited to be joining you today. Pretty good. Thanks for asking.
Speaker 1:Well, thanks for being here. You guys have a really fascinating mission. As someone who worked in sales for 30 years, I, like many salespeople sales leaders hate RFPs, and you have quite an innovative solution to RFP management and creation with AI. Before that, maybe introduce yourself the team, the mission and what does Responsive do exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, happy to. My name is Ganesh Shankar. I'm one of the co-founders of Responsive and the chief executive officer as well. Responsive is a leader in strategic response management space. What that means is we help our customers be more strategic when they respond to, like you said, rfps, rfis, security questionnaires, due diligence questionnaires, because a lot of our customers get these you know inbound of questionnaires from a lot of their external stakeholders that sometimes it could be your investors, your regulatory bodies, customers, prospective customers, analysts. So our customers are bombarded with these kind of questionnaires and not just one person, different teams, and they have to truly require a village to complete these kind of questionnaires. So that's where we come into play. We help our customers to automate that whole response process. Hence we are responsive and hence our domain is strategic response management helping our customers to respond to those various sort of questionnaires in a more effective, automated way. Of course, using our AI technology. It's even more powerful these days how we can help our customers.
Speaker 1:Well, it's a great mission, and I'd love to hear more about what inspired you and the team to create this sort of platform and a little bit about your background that led you to this current opportunity.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, my background started my career as a sales rep back in India. Moving to the US, I became a product manager. As part of the product manager, I was helping my sales teams you know, in my prior life along with my two other co-founders, putting out the right RFPs. Because I was a product manager, you can consider me as the subject matter expert when it comes to product. That you can consider me as the subject matter expert when it comes to product. Similarly, my one other co-founder, sundar, was a subject matter expert for technology and security. The third co-founder, shankar, was the implementation manager there, so he was answering anything related to implementation and training-related questions. So all of us were helping our sellers to be more effective. And sellers take their piece and then, you know, put it all together and send the proposal or an RFP to the customer.
Speaker 2:So I jokingly say this, but it's true, we don't have any cool garage story or a dorm room story like typical startup. It's truly an opportunity that we saw to automate our day-to-day you know work in our prior life. So we went into the market to see if there's any technology out there to simplify our day job. We ended up coming empty-handed every time when we looked into the market, so that's when this light bulb moment occurred. Okay, that's an opportunity for us to to uh take the reins on our own hand. You know, this is in 2015, uh, and we launched the product in 2016, almost eight years later, uh, rest is history. We are almost, uh um uh approaching 550 employees worldwide, uh, serving almost 2 000 customers customers. That includes 25 of the Fortune 100 companies using our platform. So it's a fascinating journey, thus far, still enjoying it and continue to enjoy the ride. So that's my background in a nutshell, and that's how we started Aspansive, along with my two other co-founders.
Speaker 1:So we started responsive, along with my two other co-founders. Congratulations, what a great story. So let's walk through how a typical customer uses your platform. You get an inbound questionnaire document spreadsheet of some kind. Maybe walk us through an example of how a customer leverages responsive.
Speaker 2:Awesome. So you're rightly correct. You're right to say, evan. Our customers receive an RFP in many different formats. It could be a document, it could be a sex spreadsheet, it could be a PDF document. So what happens is they upload the document in our system, our AI. What it does is it analyzes the document. Our first product, it's a modularized product. We have a product that we are calling it. We call it as requirement analysis. What does it mean is it actually goes through the document. If it is a 500-page PDF document, right, you know you have to go through page by page by page.
Speaker 2:Imagine a world where that one single line in between, somewhere it says this rfp must be responded by a veteran-owned business is different from shall be responded by a veteran-owned business. So one line it has a significant difference. If you are not a veteran-owned business, you are ultimately disqualified for this because they are saying this has to be applied by a veteran-owned business. So somebody has to go with a fine to the firm to understand what are the requirements. So now we have the technology to help them understand those key requirements even before they put the pen to the paper. Start responding to that proposal. So that's number one stage start responding to that proposal, to that number one stage. So with that, the second stage is what we call the intake, which allows them to make a go-no-go decision. So this is a good fit.
Speaker 2:Sometimes the requirement is good, but you know that it's not the right fit for you. That is not the market that you operate and you don't want to go in that. So you want to make an informed decision of go, no go. You know decision. The moment you make a go decision or the moment you make a no go decision, you have to document it because you don't want your boss, three years down the line, to come and say, hey, why did we not pursue this opportunity? No, I don't know why. Whereas if you have a system like responsive now, you're documenting it, even for the opportunities that you decided not to pursue. That's documentation.
Speaker 2:Secondly, the branch of that is let's assume you decided to go forward with it. So when you decide to go forward with it, our technology helps you to draft the first draft of responses for that RFP questionnaire that you've received. It puts together because you have used our system in the past to respond to similar RFPs, similar opportunities. So we know what is the typical answer for that. So our AI helps you to draft the first responses.
Speaker 2:Like I said and I was a subject matter expert the sellers can do all our proposal. Managers can do this work and then assign the pieces they are not sure or they're unsure. If the answer is correct to the subject matter expert, it could go to your finance team or it could go to your legal team. It could go to product team to check and verify the authenticity of the content that is there in the answers section and everybody gives a thumbs up or makes an edit and finally the sellers will be able to export it in a nicely looking document. Imagine a world. Right, even if you think of a world and you said, evan, you know you've responded a lot of our piece.
Speaker 2:Imagine if you're working with three different people okay, just a simple use case and one person using Times New Roman, another person using Arial and you are using Chancery and now, as seller, you receive and somebody using one, two, three as a bullet point and somebody is using Roman letters. Now it becomes your responsibility to normalize that document. You would rather be in front of the customer instead of normalizing the document, doing a cut and paste of the document. So that is all automated in our technology where you can distribute the work to multiple people, get it back with a simple click of a button you get a cohesive document from, especially when you make a goal decision. So I'll pass there, you know. Happy to answer any additional questions. Hopefully that gives you a picture of the platform.
Speaker 1:Oh, it sounds amazing. I wish I'd had this 25 years ago when I was in a line position in big enterprise. But many companies, I'd even say most companies view proposal teams as kind of just another back office function. And you're looking to change that perception and highlight the strategic importance of this function within organizations? And also, you know the people don't necessarily get much love or support. Oftentimes it's a one or two person job and if someone leaves, everyone's running around trying to figure out what to do next. So how do you see yourself changing this mission?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you're absolutely correct, evan. So typically you know, these proposal teams or bid management teams or tender management teams are seen as a back office. So we are on a mission to change that. You know that's an industry in which we operate, called APMP. You know industry organization called APMP, it stands for Association for Proposal Management Professionals. In fact we had a conversation with the CEO, rick Harris, of APMP. How can we move them from back office to the corner office? How can we make it more strategic? How can we so? Fundamentally, we believe the work is done. The work that the proposal teams are doing is amazing work.
Speaker 2:Amount of work, amount of, you know, the effort that goes into curating the content doesn't need to be siloed only in an RFP. We feel and we are working with some of our customers to democratize that information that they are gathering for RFP. We feel and we are working with some of our customers to democratize that information that they are gathering for RFP for many different use cases so that everybody in the company can speak the same language, not just only in RFP. That can be a new reply to an email because there is no RFP, but your prospect is asking certain questions in an email but you don't want somebody to spin up their own content on the fly. So we are trying to help our customers to democratize that information and be more strategic about how they respond to these third-party questions that they receive on an ongoing basis. So everybody in the organization speaks the same language. That will help them to mitigate the risk of miscommunication or misinformation and fundamentally helping our customers to accelerate growth, especially in the given current economic condition.
Speaker 2:Every business leader is looking for an opportunity to increase the revenue, to increase both bottom or top line and the bottom line revenue. Increase the you know, both bottom or top line and the bottom line revenue. So that is itself is a strategic move. I don't know. I've been more than happy to share with you.
Speaker 2:You know we did a recent survey. You know it's called SRM report, strategic response report. You know we partnered with APMP and we surveyed more than 750 professions that include sales, proposals, it team, all the practitioners across US, uk and India who influence this thing. That report was fascinating to see the result that came out of them because you know a lot of almost 50% of these companies you know agreed most of their revenue or opportunities comes through proposals or through RFPs or RFIs. It's fascinating to understand that. So it is not a chump change for a lot of companies to just say one RFP. No, these are becoming major instrumental, strategic initiatives to help them to grow the revenue. If you're not qualified in an RFP, your opportunity is dead right there. So our customers are trying to be more strategic on how they respond. Hopefully that gives you a little bit more color, evan.
Speaker 1:It does, indeed, and it sounds like the perfect use case for AI, but how are you leveraging AI exactly? What are some of the AI-driven features that set you guys apart from, maybe, other solutions or non-AI-based approaches to this challenge?
Speaker 2:Yeah, ai has been the core part of response from day one, evan. Even if you look for some of our old case studies in 2017, 2018, you will find AI-based RFP software. At that time, our definition of AI was a little different, and I say AI was different because we were using machine learning and pattern matching. Because we were using machine learning and pattern matching Starting in 2022, you know, later part of 2022 and early part of 2022, we started noticing the generate AI becoming more commoditized opportunity and we see you know we always embrace these kind of technology more than anybody in our space up front and we don't want to sit and wait. We saw an opportunity. What we did is we already have our own proprietary machine learning pattern matching algorithm that typically matches the best possible answer for a question that you received. It is actually coming from your library, because we know how you have responded to this kind of question in the past.
Speaker 2:So imagine in a world that that is coming, that is in a raw content. Now you know it is written by a human being. It's a passive tone. It was not properly, you know, it was not in the right message. It was a little different. So now, with the help of LLM. We have layered LLM on top of our own proprietary technology.
Speaker 2:The users in our system now can say hey, help me elaborate this content, make the passive voice to an active voice tone, make the sentiment positive. So different variety of prompts they can give. So sometimes this is a you know the user has given only you know 500 word. You know answer, but the prospect is asking only for 200 words. So you are letting the AI to condense it, elaborate it so many different ways. Sometimes you know, or even sometimes AI can help you to draft the first answer. Sometimes you don't know what to draft it. But again, we are very clear not to let the AI to hallucinate a lot. The content is actually coming from your own enterprise knowledge. It is not going to the public internet or anything like that. It is coming from your internal repository of information. We rely on multiple sources to bring in the information and fine-tune it and finesse it and then provide or present you with the right answer for a question that you're about to respond to present you with the right answer for a question that you're about to respond.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's super impressive. And how do you think about balancing automation and the sort of personalized touch that someone doing it by hand traditionally could offer? And how do you think about errors and omissions or other challenges that have always been an issue with these sort of tools. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So you know, going back to the report, Evan, you know it's also fascinating to see about 89% of the responders have said they've either implementing AI or experimenting on AI or evaluating AI technology. So that is going to be inevitable. You know, integrating AI into the way we work is going to be inevitable. So the way we see it is how can it help you augment to be better? It is not a replacement, for sure. It is more of an augmentation of what the humans are doing to help find. Like I said, we go extra length to make sure that the AI is not hallucinating, it's not creating its own content. So we have, you know, prevention methodologies that we have implemented. You know, propriety to not to minimize the hallucination there is somewhere. You know there's going to be some level of thing. So, but we have also built in the workflows along with AI to make sure there is a human review process happen. So it is not just okay, AI writes it, go submit it. No, there is a proper workflow. That is where we separate ourselves. It is not AI alone can solve everything. It has to be in combination with AI, plus project management, plus workflow management, plus collaboration, plus integration.
Speaker 2:Ai is important, but you also need to manage it as a project.
Speaker 2:You need collaborative environment that's the third piece, collaboration and you need workflow engine to make sure this goes through the proper approval process before it goes out the door. And, of course, like I said, you need to rely upon multiple sources internally. You may be having some content in your SharePoint, you may be having some content in Google Docs. You want one unified voice, but there are multiple sources and sometimes you may not even know where the most recent information is there. So you are letting the AI to determine, based on multiple signals, like what's called metadata, to feed that in and bring up the most accurate, or at least closer to the most accurate, information that can be fed into the response area and then let the humans to review it, rather than humans starting from the scratch. Now they have something to review or modify. So it is definitely a recommended approach from us to have a human eye post-response process by the AI to make sure that it is in line with what the company's or organization's message wants to be.
Speaker 1:Wow, Fantastic vision. So you guys are in high growth mode. You know what's next in terms of expanding your impact and hiring and growing. What are you sort of looking forward to over the next few months, year or two?
Speaker 2:The vision for the company this is the BHAG for the company is to truly transform how organizations exchange and share information between two. So talk about RF. Know, when you talk about RFP, there are two sides of the spectrum. Right, you know there's a buying side, there's a selling side. Today, we focus most of the time, most of our energy, on the selling side, basically your responding side. But you also have to, you know, we have to imagine that it's on the other side, at the buy side, who are asking these questions, who are soliciting these questions. So we wanted the mission for the company is to build the world's most powerful information exchange so that both sides the buy side and the sell side can freely and confidently share the most compliant information for both sides. So, instead of eliminating the need for standalone emails, eliminating the need for standalone documents, eliminating the need for standalone documents, it all happens in a portal, so it's up to date. So that's one. But, however, it is a staged approach. But we also see a huge opportunity event.
Speaker 2:Everything that I just said is about companies reacting to a questionnaire. You started the conversation with them. Hey, walk me through when you receive an RFP. So that is an assumption that you received an RFP. Our technology already has this volume of this. You know crucial information in our libraries. What we are helping our customers to do is respond to those questions. I'll put them in a reactionary bucket. You are reacting to a questionnaire, but you already have content. Now we are helping our customers to be more proactive. Don't wait for an RFP to hit your inbox. You put together all these things in a nicely looking format. Go talk to your customers and say, hey, we have responded to thousands of RFPs already. These are the typical questions that customers ask. Take a look at it.
Speaker 2:If you have any further questions, please circulate an RFP. We are helping our customers. You know it's even more prevalent in terms of security questions. A lot of AEs are going through this pain point of, oh, last minute finding a surprisingly friendly, or oh, there's a security questionnaire I have to fill. You don't have to do that again anymore so you can build a profile center and proactively share with your prospect and have them take a look at it. So right now, the focus is helping our customers be reactive, to become proactive and eventually to become proactive and eventually to become this information exchange platform as the long-term goal for our sponsor.
Speaker 1:Well, it sounds like science fiction, but it's here today. Congratulations. It's a long time coming and you're clearly doing amazing work. Maybe, who knows, one day, maybe your AI agent will go out and talk to the customer's AI agent and you won't even have questionnaires or documents or other things. But that's probably for a future episode. I'm sure you're thinking far into the future, but thanks so much, ganesh. Really interesting work. Congratulations onwards and upwards.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Evan. Thanks for having me on the show. I really appreciate the opportunity.