theCUBEd Awards | Responsive Platform (Responsive AI) by Responsive (Go-to-market (GTM) – sales, marketing, revenue, etc.)

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Ganesh Shankar

CEO and Co-Founder

Responsive

play_circle_outline Responsive's AI-powered platform for responding to business inquiries efficiently

play_circle_outline Importance of keeping human input in content creation process

play_circle_outline Integration of AI to help customers find and use the right content

play_circle_outline Secret sauce: patience, methodical approach, and thoughtful development

play_circle_outline Co-founder Ganesh Shankar's journey and key decisions leading to success

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Responsive Platform (Responsive AI) by Responsive (Go-to-market (GTM) – sales, marketing, revenue, etc.)

Ganesh Shankar

CEO and Co-Founder Responsive

Ganesh Shankar, co-founder and CEO of Responsive, joins theCUBE’s Rebecca Knight to discuss Responsive’s win in the "Top AI-Enabled Product, Go-to-market (GTM) – sales, marketing, revenue" category at the Tech Innovation CUBEd Awards. The interview highlights how Responsive’s AI-driven platform is transforming strategic response management for businesses.

Shankar shares how Responsive leverages AI to streamline proposal responses and business inquiries, boosting efficiency and decision-making. He details how the company’s technology enables organizatio... Read more

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What is the purpose of Responsive, the AI-powered platform, in helping customers with responding to inquiries such as RFPs, RFIs, security questionnaires, ESG questionnaires, and other types of inquiries needed to close deals or establish relationships effectively? add

What is the importance of keeping humans in the loop when utilizing AI for product marketing? add

What kind of impact and success has the company helped other organizations achieve, in terms of measurable results and feedback from customers? add

What factors contributed to the successful implementation of AI in your product development process? add

What values and experiences have helped shape the success of Responsive as a company, according to Ganesh? add

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Rebecca Knight

>> Hello everyone and welcome to theCUBE's Tech Innovation CUBEd Awards. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, and we are celebrating the winners of our inaugural program that showcases the incredible ingenuity and creativity that is taking place across the technology landscape. Today, we are joined by Ganesh Shankar. He is the CEO and Co-Founder of Responsive and the award winner in our Top AI-Enabled Product Go-to-Market category. Welcome, Ganesh, and congratulations.

>> Hi, Rebecca. Thank you so much. First of all, it's been an honor to be one of those awardees. I congratulate the rest of the awardees as well. But it's even more special because you said it's inaugural, so glad to be making the inaugural list. So excited to be here.

Rebecca Knight

>> You are making history, Ganesh, so thank you. And I should say for our viewers, this is recognizing cutting edge AI-enabled or AI-enhanced products that have significantly impacted and transformed how people do their jobs. So why don't we start Ganesh by telling our audience a little bit about Responsive and how it has evolved, particularly as AI has become more mainstream.

>> So by way of background, Responsive is AI-powered, what we call the strategic response management platform, helping customers to be responding to any sort of inquiries that they get, such as RFPs, RFIs, security questionnaires, ESG questionnaires, any type of inquiries that they get to get a deal done or to establish a relationship. That's where we come into play. We help our customers to respond to those kind of inquiries in a very effective way. With the AI, we help fine tune the message around how they are communicated to the outside world. In a nutshell, Responsive is the AI-powered platform helping customers to respond to various business impact inquiries.

Rebecca Knight

>> And this is a critical part of business because if companies and organizations don't respond, then business doesn't get done. So let's talk about the particular problem that Responsive aims to solve and one that many companies in lots of different industries have grappled with, and that is proposal responses. So why don't you start by painting the picture of the status quo in terms of the time and resources and energy that it takes to respond to these kinds of ?

>> Yeah, it's an interesting time. So very recently we did a case study with Microsoft and I can go into that detail. So what we have noticed is in terms of timing, when you get a question, whether it's an RFP question or an email, so what we have noticed is it takes almost about 25 to 30 minutes to find the right content. Again, not a simple yes or no. If you want to be meaningful providing, after implementing responsive, that became 20 minutes. And now adding our AI on top of our existing platform, it's actually now they've reduced from almost 35 minutes to 12 minutes. So basically you are giving a nice piece of content to the customers in about, what, an efficiency of almost 65% they've gained over a period of time from a completely manual process to using our AI suite of applications. So that's a 65% efficiency gain in just that process alone. You can extrapolate that with multiple inquiries that you're getting. It's a massive ROI for our customers.

Rebecca Knight

>> Absolutely. So why don't we back up and talk a little bit about how Responsive has integrated AI into its features and functionality to help these customers achieve that 65% gain?

>> Yeah, absolutely. So again, like you said, we do feel responding to these inquiries are very critical part of winning businesses. I think gone are those days where... in the initial time when we started responsive, the problem is finding the right content. The content is not there, the content is there is sporadic, it's everywhere. But the problem now we are seeing, especially in this AI world, is there's too much of content. That's what we call it as knowledge dystopia. That is a term.

Rebecca Knight

>> I like that. That is accurate.

Rebecca Knight

>> Because our sellers or what we call it as field members, be it your sellers or your account managers, they have so much information, and on top of it, AI is generating a lot of content. So which one to use? Which content is the right content? Which content is approved content? That's where Responsive AI comes into picture. In fact, I know very recently I had an enterprise customer, they were talking about using general, in fact they call it general purpose AI. Their search term was, "What is our employee count?" In a general purpose. And the result was a number that was accurate in 2023. The content is outdated, the content is stale. Luckily, the person who uses Responsive was there and they were able to correct them, "Hey, no, no, this is not the right number. Please use Responsive AI because that information we have already curated, we've already got approval by the HR. So your number, what you find in Responsive is much more accurate because that is what went out the door as an RFP response last week for a different customer for a different prospect." You can democratize that information for everything else so that it is one single source of truth they're communicated without. It's not coming from the internet, it is not hallucinating, it is approved by a subject matter expert. We called it as subject matter expert, in this case it's the HR. Where did we use our AI? How do we fine tune? Instead of simply saying, "Oh yes, we have X, Y, Z," can we fine tune it? Can we finesse that information? Can we make it client-facing? That is where Responsive AI come into picture. But fundamentally we keep human in the loop. That is essential. Not everything can be done by AI, unless you have the raw content, right? Let's assume I'm asking for a product overview. The product marketing person can give the raw content. Responsive AI can finesse it, fine tune that so that it becomes... You can prompt like, "Okay, I want this tone. We want to be active voice. Don't go in passive... The users don't need to worry about, okay, I'm using an active voice or a passive voice or a neutral sentiment. That can be handled by AI these days. But fundamental raw content need to come from the humans. So we bridge the gap between humans in the loop or subject matters in the loop, leveraging AI expertise to fine tune that so that we can send the message to the external inquirer, it could be customer, it could be partner, it could be a prospect, so that you're putting your best foot forward to win a deal.

Rebecca Knight

>> And ensuring that that is taking place with speed and accuracy. Because otherwise, as you said at the very outset, the customer, the client, and perhaps even the employee is operating in a world of knowledge dystopia where they're seeing different answers in different places.

>> Absolutely. Again, as we all hear, I'm actually at a conference and one term we keep hearing is the term called agent washing. So they're using over agentifying. I think it is true to an extent, there's a lot of noise in the market. As a leader in our space, we've been very thoughtful on how we implement, be it a Responsive agent or be it Responsive AI, end of the day, it has to have a meaningful, what we call it as a business value. It has to use argument or core users day-to-day job. It has to simplify it. So a lot of time as you've probably, I'm sure you've used this general AI technologies today, be it ChatGPT, the immediate question thought process comes to your mind is, okay, I have this question in my mind, I need an answer now. At this point of stage, it is a given. Every technology company is going to say some sort. But how can we take it even further? That's where we are coming into picture. Basically we help not just responding, but we have so far, just to give you a scale, we are almost approaching 200,000 customers worldwide, almost more than half a million users in the system, and processed over 650 billion worth of opportunities in our platform. So we have so much of enterprise knowledge. We use that to help our customers to make an informed decision. So for example, you don't need to create complex reporting these days with our AI because you don't need to drag and drop columns. All those things can be natural with the natural language. Basically you can say, "I would like to understand which particular domain we are winning proposals, which is not a good area for us, which segment is working properly, which product or piece that we are winning?" So basically you can type in your natural language English prompts. Our system, again, a lot of times we hear about creating answer for a particular question, but this is the insights. We talk about insights. Can we provide insights for our customers so that I can make an informed decision to, again, win a deal so that they're not spending wasted energy, things that they don't need to spend on. Because if they know this is the area that we are winning, they could double down on that inside. You don't need complex reporting with our AI. With a simple prompt, our AI have the framework to provide and understand that contextually and give you those reports back, but in a very consumable way so that you can make an informed decision.

Rebecca Knight

>> Right, exactly. And the data-driven decision-making that will enable so much more too. So one of the things our judges were really impressed by were the tangible results and the measurable impact and success that your company has helped other organizations achieve. Can you talk a little bit about that? I know you mentioned the 65% increase in speed and accuracy, but it can even be anecdotal in terms of what you're hearing, the feedback that you're getting from customers in terms of how this has helped them do more business, do more transactions.

>> It's not even anecdotal, right. And if you look at 60% of timing, it is now what I'm hearing from our customers, they're actually responding to more RFPs, which they've traditionally passed on because they didn't have the bandwidth, they didn't have the time to do it, so now they're giving it a shot. That means they are in the deal. First order of business, to secure a deal, you have to be on their deal. So first for that, you need to have time. Now our customers are saying, "We are doing more with less and we are actually in more deals that we have historically passed on because of low bandwidth." That is, I see a winning combination because we are helping our customers to be in many of those deals, which helps both top line and bottom line. End of the day, sometimes you could have been a perfect fit, but you were not the first, you didn't know there was an opportunity because your team was busy in solving a problem that is happening or it didn't happen. Now, with all those time-saving, it is not a replacement. And now I think we are looking at our users are more productive or getting more opportunities inside the door so that they are participating in more business opportunities. I think that is a winning combination. That is what we are seeing from our customers, now they are part of more opportunities than ever before

Rebecca Knight

>> Simply because they're in the game, as you said. Simple.

>> Exactly. Yeah.

Rebecca Knight

>> So tell me about your secret sauce. Every company has one, and we're especially interested in our award winners and how they describe what is it about their distinctive approach and style that has allowed you to push boundaries and achieve this?

>> I would attribute to few things, Rebecca. One is our logical patience. Again, one of our core values, get it done, and the other core value is be agile and nimble. We are very quick in delivering or developing a feature with the AI. Again, we didn't jump onto it on day one, okay, because everybody is doing it. We definitely never want to be a me too type solution. Rather we took the time to understand the business value that we can give it to our customers. Then once we identified that, we were the fastest company to deliver that to the customer. Because we took time to understand because we didn't want to rush and haphazardly give something which customers don't feel the value. So we took time to understand what is this? And then it's natural, in the end of the day, if you look at it as you and I discussed, there's so much of noise in the market about AI today, and because of that, what happens is typically it forces the companies to jump onto it, be it the customer or the providers like ourselves. Okay, there's something happening, fear of missing out and it's always the case. But we resisted that initially to take some time to understand. I would say we are the best product team that I've worked for who took some time, but who came with some innovative solution our customers embraced today. I think since we launched our product just recently, almost more than 30% of our customers have already embraced the AI because our journey goes far beyond this generative AI thing. But we have been in existence for 10 years. Now when we launch it, we anticipate that 30% to be almost 60% to 65% this year. By end of next year, probably 100% of our customers will be leveraging from our AI. Because we work with pretty large companies, almost 25 of the Fortune 100 companies use our platform. So think of this way, it is not, okay, quickly whip off some features and then give it to the customer. We have to be very thoughtful the change management our customers have to go through, these large companies. They can't just flip off a switch . So we have to work with them, we have to help them to go through the change management. And our customers really appreciated our methodical approach of how step-by-step we were able to help them. And that is where I think we have also got a lot of word of mouth. Within our segment, we are a known brand. Customer, if they're talking about Responsive, they know this is a solid product. They are getting the best out of the best company in the space.

Rebecca Knight

>> I love what you're saying, that your secret sauce is actually being patient, being methodical and being thoughtful. I think that a lot of companies could maybe learn from what you're saying. Ganesh, this is not your first rodeo. You've had a long esteemed career in technology, but Responsive is your baby. You founded it, as you said. Tell me about, when you look back at your journey and reflect on your career so far, was there a key turning point for you or decision that helped lead to this recognition today?

>> Yeah, so I touched upon a few things, especially on our own values, Rebecca, how this company is. We have five values. I already touched upon two, get it done and be agile and nimble is another one. So I will say, Responsive was co-founded by three of us back in 2015. We still are very much involved into the business, the three of us are involved, but our background has been responding to our feeds, responding secure. Put together, we had a big almost 50 plus man-years of experience doing what we are doing today in the product, but prior to that, as an employee of a different company. But the biggest experience I would say is we did not assume the problem that we had or we faced is the universal problem. We have another value, we call it as an S4, S4 stands for see something, say something. We truly embrace that value with our customers because we said, okay, we did not go with an assumption that everything that we thought is the problem is the problem. If you look at our journey, our version one of our product is much, much, much different from our version 1.B or C, because we just used our initial idea as a beginning, but we never held our saying, "Okay, we are not going to resist our openness to feedback." I'll just give you a simple example. A lot of companies say, "We listen to customers, we listen to employees." How do you make that? It's a huge difference. So for example, if you log into our product, there's a simple button called submit idea. As a user, you can submit your idea within the product. It not just goes in into a black box actually. Again, just to give you a sense of how we have built this company, that essentially became a huge hit. Even today, we still have that. I said, we almost have approaching half a million users in this system. So if you as a user put in an idea, rest of 499,000 plus users will see that and they can upvote on it, downvote on it. So basically it became like a crowdsourcing idea from the real users, not just we are trying to break our head. It's a partnership between which we have with our users and our experience, our product team, and as well as our employees, S4. And not just product team, sales team or customer success team. When they see something in the market, when they see a use case from the market, they have to say it. So we embraced that and we built it as part of the product building. So I truly believe that is one of our strengths of embracing the market feedback as quickly as possible and put our spin, put our innovation on top of it.

Rebecca Knight

>> Excellent. Well, Ganesh, thank you so much for being on the show, and congratulations again.

>> Thank you, Rebecca. I really appreciate the opportunity to be on your show. Again, so honored to be recognized as one of theCUBEd awardees. So thank you so much

Rebecca Knight

>> And thank you to our viewers for tuning into this special segment of theCUBE's Tech Innovation Cube Awards. I'm Rebecca Knight, stay tuned for more.