Two people, the whole sales org, and a tool that only matched keywords
At Whatfix, a two-person bid management team supports the entire sales organization. Between them, they handle RFXs, security and infosec reviews, cloud questionnaires, vendor due-diligence forms, and the value propositions that go with new and existing opportunities. A standard RFP takes a week or more to complete end-to-end, and ad hoc questions tend to land on tight, customer-driven timelines. For a long time, the team relied on Responsive (formerly RFPIO) as its incumbent RFP tool, but it couldn't keep up with either the volume or the nuance of what customers actually asked.
The core issue, as Subhashish Baruah, Bid Manager at Whatfix, explained, was that the tool "didn't have native AI capabilities." Its recommendation engine and autofill "weren't highly effective," he said, "and none of the answers were context-aware; it was just keyword or semantic matching."
That gap showed up in the output. Responses came back incomplete, they noted, riddled with "no information found" results and empty cells that the team then had to chase down by hand. For two people covering all of sales, stitching answers together from multiple sources against the turnaround times customers expected simply didn't scale.
Autofill for the first pass, Reasoning Mode for everything hard
Today, SiftHub sits at the center of the bid team's workflow. When a requirement arrives with line items to respond to, the team runs Autofill to generate a first draft, then reviews and refines. SiftHub's Autofill Reasoning Mode works through each requirement in a question, even long, complex multi-part questions, and surfaces the sources behind every answer.
Beyond RFPs, Subhashish uses the AI Teammate for related opportunities: bid/no-bid analysis, competitive analysis, and building value propositions against competitors using web sources. Having worked closely with SiftHub as an early design partner, the team has helped shape features they now rely on daily.
That reliance is the point. "Today I cannot imagine my day without SiftHub," said Suyash Pandey, Bid Manager at Whatfix. For the team, it has simply "become a part of our bid management [team]." Confidence in the answers comes from being able to trace them: because SiftHub "shows us the sources it picked a response from," they explained, "and because the information comes directly from our own sources, that's where we get the confidence that it's the right information."
The team keeps pushing on what SiftHub can do: running content "boosting" exercises on recent documents and Q&As, refreshing the repository, and working to grow adoption among other teams that already use it to generate quick responses.
Half the edits, 60% less drafting time, 700 questions in a week
Reasoning Mode changed the economics of the work. Answers now come back more comprehensive and more complete against every requirement, which means far less rework on the back end.
"Around 40 to 50% was the quantified value we saw for major edits being reduced," Subhashish said, and review time has "come down around 50%." The team now makes mostly minor edits: "We use most of the answers as is, because they're good enough and they're coming from recent sources."
"It's a very critical part of our daily operations. It helps me turn around more requests in less time, with higher accuracy and context-aware answers."
Getting to a usable draft is faster, too, and the manual searching that used to eat into every response has shrunk. They estimated that roughly "40% of manual searching time" has reduced on top of the gains they were already seeing.
The difference is most visible under load: in one recent week, the team cleared a surge of about 700 questions, a volume they call "impossible" to turn around without the platform, which he rates "around 200% better" than the tool they used before.
What lands hardest for Suyash is the quality of what comes back. Asked what changed most between the old answers and the new ones, his reply was one word – "context". The responses are more contextual and more aligned with what each customer is really asking. It's why, for a two-person team carrying an entire sales org, SiftHub earns the single word he uses to describe it: "dependable."
.avif)
