Dhiren Bhatia is the Co-Founder & CEO of Inventive AI, an AI-powered RFP and questionnaire response management platform.
RFP stands for Request for Proposal, a proper document issued by organizations to ask vendors or service providers to submit proposals for specific projects or services. The RFP outlines the project requirements, objectives, and evaluation criteria, allowing qualified vendors to submit detailed bids on how they plan to satisfy the organization’s needs.
Inventive AI is an AI-powered platform designed to streamline and optimize the response process for RFPs and questionnaires. By automating tasks reminiscent of drafting responses, gathering relevant data, and customizing proposals for specific clients, Inventive AI significantly improves the efficiency of sales response workflows, driving over 70% efficiency gains for businesses. This enables corporations to reply to RFPs faster, more accurately, and with greater consistency, ultimately enhancing their possibilities of winning more contracts.
What inspired the founding of Inventive AI, and the way did your personal experiences with RFP workflows shape its mission?
After taking some time without work following my last exit (selling Viewics to Roche), I noticed I missed the joy and challenges of constructing a startup. During my time at Roche, my teams were involved in quite a few RFPs, and I consistently saw how difficult it was to craft strategic, efficient responses. This experience highlighted a transparent opportunity, and I got down to explore it further. Through conversations and interviews with dozens of corporations, I validated that this pain point was widespread, reinforcing my decision to dive back in and construct an answer to deal with it.
What were the important thing pain points within the RFP process that you just identified, and the way does Inventive AI address those challenges?
The important thing pain points within the RFP process include:
- Manual, time-consuming effort: The method can take days and even weeks of labor resulting from the extensive manual input required.
- Managing content and knowledge: It’s difficult to keep up and organize the knowledge base for crafting accurate and relevant responses.
- Strategic responses: Responding effectively requires understanding the shopper’s specific needs and considering the competition, making it difficult to tailor responses strategically.
- Collaboration across teams: Gathering input from multiple material experts and senior stakeholders will be cumbersome and result in delays.
- Compliance and risk management: Ensuring alignment with regulatory requirements, internal policies, and legal constraints adds complexity and potential risks.
Inventive AI addresses these challenges with a collection of proprietary AI-driven agents designed to automate and streamline key facets of the method. By leveraging AI, the platform significantly reduces manual effort, organizes and optimizes content management, enhances strategic response generation, simplifies stakeholder collaboration, and ensures compliance and risk management—multi functional integrated solution.
How does Inventive AI’s technology make RFP responses faster and more accurate in comparison with traditional methods?
Our founding team brings deep expertise in machine learning, particularly in language models. Gaurav Nemade, an early Product Manager at Google Brain, contributed to the event of LLMs, while Vishakh Hegde conducted AI research at Stanford University. Leveraging this expertise, we’ve developed a proprietary pipeline and suite of tools that deliver accurate, strategic responses inside seconds, all grounded in our customers’ unique knowledge sources. This allows us to offer an answer that is just not only fast but additionally highly tailored to every client’s needs.
What makes RFP management a critical area for automation, and the way does Inventive AI tackle this?
RFP management is a critical area for automation because an RFP signifies a high level of interest and buying intent for an organization’s services or products. Delivering a high-quality, strategic response is crucial for maximizing sales opportunities. This process demands accuracy, compliance, risk management, and competitive positioning, all of which will be time-consuming and vulnerable to errors when done manually.
Inventive AI tackles this challenge by automating key facets of RFP management through advanced AI technology. The platform ensures that responses are accurate, compliant with regulations, and strategically aligned with customer needs. By automating these tasks, Inventive AI not only improves the standard and consistency of responses but additionally allows corporations to handle a better volume of RFPs, expanding their ability to pursue more opportunities and ultimately increasing win rates.
Why are RFPs often missed in digital transformation, and the way is Inventive AI changing this dynamic?
RFPs are sometimes missed in digital transformation initiatives because they’re seen as administrative or transactional tasks quite than strategic opportunities for innovation. Many corporations focus their digital transformation efforts on customer-facing functions, internal operations, or product development, leaving procurement and sales processes, like RFP management, relatively untouched. That is partly because RFP processes are traditionally manual and highly customized, which may make them seem less suitable for automation or digital overhaul.
Moreover, the complexity and cross-functional nature of RFPs often lead corporations to assume that automating or streamlining these processes could be too difficult or disruptive. In consequence, the potential gains from improving RFP workflows—reminiscent of increased efficiency, higher accuracy, faster turnaround times, and enhanced competitiveness—are often missed during digital transformation efforts. Nevertheless, with the progress in AI and thereby solutions like Inventive AI, automating RFP management is just not only feasible but can even provide significant strategic benefits.
Are you able to explain how the unified knowledge hub works, and the way it integrates with various enterprise systems?
The Inventive AI Knowledge Hub functions as a centralized, AI-powered resource that acts like a topic expert (SME) with access to an organization’s vast, distributed knowledge. In a typical enterprise, relevant content for responding to sales questionnaires and RFPs exists across multiple systems and departments, making it difficult to manually pull together accurate and strategic responses. An easy Q&A library of boilerplate responses is commonly insufficient for creating competitive, tailored proposals.
Inventive AI addresses this challenge by integrating with commonly used enterprise systems reminiscent of Salesforce, Hubspot, Seismic, Google Drive, SharePoint, OneDrive, and more. Our AI can mechanically ingest and understand the context of the incoming RFP, retrieving probably the most relevant information from across these platforms to craft high-quality responses. Moreover, our AI agents—accountable for tasks reminiscent of competitive research, error checking, conflict resolution, and compliance and risk management—operate on this unified Knowledge Hub, ensuring consistency and accuracy by leveraging a whole, connected view of the corporate’s knowledge, quite than counting on siloed content.
What are the important thing features of Inventive AI that differentiate it from other RFP management tools available on the market?
What differentiates Inventive AI from other RFP management tools is our give attention to helping customers win RFPs, not only answer questions. While many tools simply provide a method to seek for boilerplate responses inside a static database, requiring the shopper to always maintain and update it, Inventive AI goes far beyond that. Our platform dynamically leverages enterprise-wide knowledge and uses advanced AI to generate strategic, high-quality responses tailored to every RFP, significantly increasing win rates.
Our deep enterprise experience and AI expertise allow us to deal with each the business and technical facets of the RFP process. We’ve built a system that not only delivers accurate responses but additionally effectively manages AI challenges like language model hallucinations, ensuring precision and relevance in every response. This level of response quality and strategic insight is unmatched out there, making Inventive AI a real competitive advantage for RFP management.
How does the AI Content Manager make sure that only probably the most relevant and up-to-date information is utilized in RFP responses?
That is a terrific query and easier said than done. While it’s relatively straightforward to create a compelling demo using popular AI tools like OpenAI, Google, or AWS, our platform goes beyond easy solutions which can be just not ok for enterprise settings. Drawing from our AI research backgrounds at Google and Stanford Research, we’ve built a proprietary machine learning pipeline combined with a technique of specialised AI agents. This enables us to make sure that only probably the most relevant and up-to-date content is utilized in RFP responses, repeatedly refining the accuracy of the knowledge.
When the AI encounters uncertainty, it doesn’t make assumptions. As a substitute, it presents users with potential options and learns from the feedback provided. This iterative learning ensures that future responses are much more precise when similar questions arise, improving over time and ensuring that RFP responses stay relevant, current, and strategic.
What sort of productivity boosts have users seen through the use of Inventive AI’s suite of AI agents, and what specific tasks do these agents handle?
Users of Inventive AI’s suite of AI agents have seen significant productivity boosts, particularly of their ability to reply to a greater variety of RFPs, which directly impacts top-line revenue. By generating more strategic, accurate, and tailored responses, corporations have also experienced higher win rates. Customers report that they complete the RFP process 70% faster than before, allowing them to tackle more opportunities without sacrificing quality.
Our AI agents handle quite a lot of critical tasks, reminiscent of conducting competitive evaluation, brainstorming response ideas, and detecting stale or outdated content. In addition they discover conflicting information inside responses, unearth multiple potential answers to RFP questions, and check for compliance with regulatory or internal guidelines. These automated capabilities enable teams to give attention to higher-value activities, ensuring that responses are each efficient and strategically sound.
