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 formal document issued by organizations to invite 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 meet 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 such as 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 allows companies to respond to RFPs faster, more accurately, and with greater consistency, ultimately enhancing their chances of winning more contracts.
What inspired the founding of Inventive AI, and how did your personal experiences with RFP workflows shape its mission?
After taking some time off following my last exit (selling Viewics to Roche), I realized I missed the excitement and challenges of building a startup. During my time at Roche, my teams were involved in numerous RFPs, and I consistently saw how difficult it was to craft strategic, efficient responses. This experience highlighted a clear opportunity, and I set out to explore it further. Through conversations and interviews with dozens of companies, I validated that this pain point was widespread, reinforcing my decision to dive back in and build a solution to address it.
What were the key pain points in the RFP process that you identified, and how does Inventive AI address those challenges?
The key pain points in the RFP process include:
- Manual, time-consuming effort: The process can take days or even weeks of work due to the extensive manual input required.
- Managing content and knowledge: It’s challenging to maintain and organize the knowledge base for crafting accurate and relevant responses.
- Strategic responses: Responding effectively requires understanding the customer’s specific needs and considering the competition, making it difficult to tailor responses strategically.
- Collaboration across teams: Gathering input from multiple subject matter experts and senior stakeholders can be cumbersome and lead to 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 suite of proprietary AI-driven agents designed to automate and streamline key aspects of the process. 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—all in one integrated solution.
How does Inventive AI’s technology make RFP responses faster and more accurate compared to 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 development 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 within seconds, all grounded in our customers’ unique knowledge sources. This enables us to provide a solution that is not only fast but also highly tailored to each client’s needs.
What makes RFP management a critical area for automation, and how 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 a company’s products or services. 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 can be time-consuming and prone to errors when done manually.
Inventive AI tackles this challenge by automating key aspects 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 quality and consistency of responses but also allows companies to handle a higher volume of RFPs, expanding their ability to pursue more opportunities and ultimately increasing win rates.
Why are RFPs often overlooked in digital transformation, and how is Inventive AI changing this dynamic?
RFPs are often overlooked in digital transformation initiatives because they are seen as administrative or transactional tasks rather than strategic opportunities for innovation. Many companies focus their digital transformation efforts on customer-facing functions, internal operations, or product development, leaving procurement and sales processes, like RFP management, relatively untouched. This is partly because RFP processes are traditionally manual and highly customized, which can make them seem less suitable for automation or digital overhaul.
Additionally, the complexity and cross-functional nature of RFPs often lead companies to assume that automating or streamlining these processes would be too difficult or disruptive. As a result, the potential gains from improving RFP workflows—such as increased efficiency, better accuracy, faster turnaround times, and enhanced competitiveness—are frequently missed during digital transformation efforts. However, with the progress in AI and thereby solutions like Inventive AI, automating RFP management is not only feasible but can also provide significant strategic advantages.
Can you explain how the unified knowledge hub works, and how it integrates with various enterprise systems?
The Inventive AI Knowledge Hub functions as a centralized, AI-powered resource that acts like a subject matter expert (SME) with access to a company’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. A simple Q&A library of boilerplate responses is often insufficient for creating competitive, tailored proposals.
Inventive AI addresses this challenge by integrating with commonly used enterprise systems such as Salesforce, Hubspot, Seismic, Google Drive, SharePoint, OneDrive, and more. Our AI can automatically ingest and understand the context of the incoming RFP, retrieving the most relevant information from across these platforms to craft high-quality responses. Additionally, our AI agents—responsible for tasks such as competitive research, error checking, conflict resolution, and compliance and risk management—operate on this unified Knowledge Hub, ensuring consistency and accuracy by leveraging a complete, connected view of the company’s knowledge, rather than relying on siloed content.
What are the key features of Inventive AI that differentiate it from other RFP management tools on the market?
What differentiates Inventive AI from other RFP management tools is our focus on helping customers win RFPs, not just answer questions. While many tools simply provide a way to search for boilerplate responses within a static database, requiring the customer to constantly 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 each RFP, significantly increasing win rates.
Our deep enterprise experience and AI expertise allow us to address both the business and technical aspects of the RFP process. We’ve built a system that not only delivers accurate responses but also 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 in the market, making Inventive AI a true competitive advantage for RFP management.
How does the AI Content Manager ensure that only the most relevant and up-to-date information is used in RFP responses?
This is a great question 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 simple solutions that are just not good enough 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 strategy of specialized AI agents. This allows us to ensure that only the most relevant and up-to-date content is used in RFP responses, continuously refining the accuracy of the information.
When the AI encounters uncertainty, it doesn’t make assumptions. Instead, it presents users with potential options and learns from the feedback provided. This iterative learning ensures that future responses are even more precise when similar questions arise, improving over time and ensuring that RFP responses stay relevant, current, and strategic.
What kind of productivity boosts have users seen by using 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 in their ability to respond to a greater number of RFPs, which directly impacts top-line revenue. By generating more strategic, accurate, and tailored responses, companies have also experienced higher win rates. Customers report that they complete the RFP process 70% faster than before, allowing them to take on more opportunities without sacrificing quality.
Our AI agents handle a variety of critical tasks, such as conducting competitive analysis, brainstorming response ideas, and detecting stale or outdated content. They also identify conflicting information within responses, unearth multiple potential answers to RFP questions, and check for compliance with regulatory or internal guidelines. These automated capabilities enable teams to focus on higher-value activities, ensuring that responses are both efficient and strategically sound.
Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit Inventive AI.
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