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wired. RFPs

5:17

with tedious questions asking for information

5:20

such as the cloud services uptime

5:22

or its support for multi-factor authentication

5:24

are an unavoidable stage in all

5:26

sorts of sales processes, from software

5:29

deals to light bulbs. Customers

5:32

get a book of jargon, statistics,

5:34

and promises to justify an eventual

5:36

purchase and use it in any

5:38

future dispute. But no

5:40

one enjoys writing or answering the questions,

5:43

which in tech pulls top engineers away

5:45

from more important projects. Everyone

5:48

involved openly jokes or perhaps secretly

5:50

fears that no one reads the

5:52

responses before tapping the buy button

5:54

anyway. Generative

5:56

AI's arrival has brought welcome relief

5:58

to many workers. trapped in RFP

6:01

hell, and potentially offers a

6:03

counterpoint to the anxiety that AI writers

6:05

will replace humans. At

6:07

the same time, it's prompting questions over

6:09

how much longer humans will be involved

6:12

in some business admin practices. As

6:15

more RFP responses are crafted by

6:17

AI, bots will inevitably start writing

6:19

the questions too. Before

6:21

long, other bots may be scoring proposals

6:23

and recommending winners leaving humans to just

6:26

do a brief double check. The

6:28

AI-RFP is a baby step toward

6:31

replacing the RFP with something better,

6:33

says Peter Bonnie, CEO of Vendorful,

6:35

which recently started selling a tool

6:37

similar to that used inside Twilio.

6:40

When Lawson laid off 11% of Twilio's

6:42

several thousand employees in September 2022 and an

6:46

additional 17% in February,

6:49

he said the company had to become more efficient.

6:53

Generative AI is a central pillar of his

6:55

plan to boost productivity. He

6:57

started toying with the technology during nights

6:59

and weekends in 2020, using text generators

7:02

to brainstorm and to compile silly

7:04

dinner recipes. When

7:06

OpenAI began selling access to

7:08

GPT-4, the large language model

7:10

powering the paid version of

7:12

ChatGPT, Lawson asked his staff

7:14

to work on tools to streamline Twilio's

7:17

operations. To create

7:19

the RFP bot, a handful

7:21

of data scientists and a

7:23

solutions engineer at Twilio began

7:25

experimenting with augmenting GPT-4's inherent

7:27

vocabulary, which comes from scraping the

7:29

text of websites and books. They

7:32

devised a method that pairs a

7:34

program that retrieves snippets relevant to

7:36

the questions in an RFP from

7:38

technical documentation and other sources inside

7:40

the company with a system that

7:42

directs GPT-4 to summarize those snippets

7:44

in a clear and professional tone.

7:47

GPT-4 proved capable of

7:49

generating extremely accurate responses,

7:52

though solutions engineers and technical experts still

7:54

review or edit every answer before sending

7:56

them off to a prospective client. The

8:00

tech industry has begun calling systems

8:02

like Twilio's Retrieval Augmented Generation, or

8:04

RAG. Browse,

8:07

a new option in paid chat

8:09

GPT, functions similarly by summarizing search

8:11

results from Microsoft Bing to help

8:13

answer users' questions. It

8:15

cuts down on large language models' so-called

8:17

hallucinations, where they make up information when

8:19

there are gaps in their knowledge. Jay

8:22

Schuren, Chief Customer Officer at DataRobot, compares RAG

8:24

to handing someone a cue card with some

8:27

facts listed in asking them to make a

8:29

speech. The language model

8:31

tells a coherent story, but it sticks to the

8:33

script, he says. The RAG

8:35

approach is also in many cases much cheaper

8:37

than training or fine-tuning a large language model

8:40

to a specific task. Twilio's

8:42

RFP Genie, as it's unofficially

8:44

known internally, operates globally and

8:46

in multiple languages. Account

8:49

executives can now solicit more business because they

8:51

can respond to RFPs they would have previously

8:53

lacked time to pick up. By

8:56

Twilio's estimate, the bot handles about 80% of

8:59

an RFP and staff fill the rest

9:01

with reporting and categorizing their corrections. We're

9:04

not reducing these roles because, with

9:06

the time saved, these teams can

9:08

address more RFPs and spend more

9:10

time interacting with and helping more

9:12

customers than before, company spokesperson Mia

9:14

Shatama says. The

9:16

company is working on having the tool

9:18

automatically improve based on staffers' edits to

9:20

AI-generated answers. It also hopes to

9:23

give the tool some more character. When

9:25

asked by a company staffer about

9:27

its favorite question to answer, the

9:29

bot dryly replied, I don't have

9:31

personal preferences or feelings, before noting,

9:33

I particularly excel at answering questions

9:35

related to Twilio's features, customer stories,

9:37

and use cases. Twilio

9:40

developed similar chatbots, details of which could

9:42

not be learned, to help other teams

9:45

in its sales force gather information about

9:47

the company's offerings. Its

9:49

overall cast of chatbots answer more than

9:51

12,000 questions each

9:53

month, including roughly 5,000

9:56

directed at the RFP tool, according to

9:58

Shatama. DataRobot's RFP

10:00

bot lives inside Slack, where

10:02

since July, account executives can

10:05

type tricky questions from a

10:07

prospective client, like does the

10:09

product support containerization natively as

10:11

a delivery capability? From

10:13

there, the bot powered by OpenAI's

10:16

technology via Microsoft's cloud functions similarly

10:18

to Twilio's but also shows the

10:20

salesperson a confidence score for every

10:22

answer. Knowing whether you

10:25

can or can't rely on the results

10:27

is critical, DataRobot's Shuren says. In

10:29

August, the company unveiled an AI platform

10:32

that enables customers to build their own

10:34

responder for RFPs. Google

10:36

Cloud began working on its RFP bot

10:39

earlier this year after Phil Moyer, global

10:41

vice president of its AI business, recognized

10:43

the tool as a perfect first use

10:45

of generative AI. We

10:47

must get asked 100 times a month

10:50

how do we adhere to GDPR,

10:52

he says, referring to the European Union's

10:54

massive privacy law. Automating

10:56

responses spares talented workers from drudgery,

10:59

he says. Google has

11:01

just begun rolling out the RFP to

11:03

its salespeople and expects to save tens

11:05

of thousands of hours of labor annually.

11:08

In July, ad buying agency Essence

11:10

MediaCom introduced its own version using

11:12

Google Cloud technology. Tackling

11:15

RFPs is seen as a low risk

11:18

use case for generative AI at many

11:20

companies, which have been automating parts of

11:22

the process for years. Some

11:25

companies use systems that pluck relevant

11:27

responses from a pool of thousands of

11:29

pre-written answers. Secureframe, a

11:31

major developer of software for buying security

11:33

tools, offers a product to do that

11:36

but is planning to add generative AI.

11:39

The technology should perform well enough that

11:41

it seems like your security team is

11:43

actually answering the questions, says Ruo Ting

11:45

Sun, vice president of product at Secureframe.

12:00

they have not noticed any that appear to

12:02

be written by generative AI. To

12:05

be honest, I hadn't thought about it. I may

12:07

have, says Michael Schlosser, Senior

12:09

Vice President of Care Information and

12:11

Innovation at US hospital giant HCA

12:13

Healthcare. As RFP

12:15

bots help sales teams get more

12:17

done, executives like Schlosser can probably

12:19

expect their own workload to rise.

12:22

Smaller companies are pitching for opportunities they

12:24

had never considered before because of limited

12:26

staff, says Mac Liu, CEO of

12:29

Voltron, which helps companies automate bidding

12:31

for government contracts. Generative

12:34

AI is enabling a whole new set of

12:36

products and solutions to work with the government,

12:38

Liu says.