“Responsive AI analyzes each RFP question, pulls the best approved content, and tailors it specifically to the customer’s request. It saves our team time and ensures customers get stronger, more relevant responses every time.”
Justin Walsh
Solutions Consultant at BlueConic
The gist
BlueConic is the Customer Growth Engine that helps B2C brands turn every customer signal into action that drives growth. BlueConic’s Solutions Consulting (SC) team was stretched thin by a growing volume of RFPs, security questionnaires, and product demos. Outdated and hard-to-find content forced Solutions Consultants to rewrite most responses from scratch. Only 16% of answers came from approved content, and leadership lacked visibility into the SC team’s impact.
After reorganizing its Responsive Content Library, BlueConic added Responsive AI to drive a more efficient response process and provide visibility to leadership. Content usage climbed as high as 74%, average effort per RFP dropped 54%, and total response hours fell 72%. AI-assisted drafts — supported by TRACE Score™ and source citations — enabled faster reviews, higher-quality responses, and clear reporting that connected presales efficiency to revenue outcomes.
This initiative is part of BlueConic’s broader shift toward becoming an AI-first, AI-native Customer Growth Engine. By building trusted, governed AI workflows internally, BlueConic strengthens the same capabilities it delivers to customers, helping them activate first-party data with AI to drive growth and relevance at scale.
The rundown
BlueConic’s response challenge
- A Solutions Consulting team managed every RFP, proposal, security questionnaire, and product demo. As request volume increased, pressure mounted to keep up without becoming a bottleneck in sales cycles.
- Content was outdated, duplicated, and difficult to locate, forcing Solutions Consultants to start from scratch on most responses.
- Only 16% of responses were drawn from approved content during one quarter, even when similar questions had already been answered in the past.
- Leadership lacked visibility into workload and performance, making it difficult to justify additional support or clearly demonstrate the SC team’s contribution to revenue growth.
Impact and results
- Content Library usage climbed from 16% to as high as 74%, enabling faster responses by using recommended answers instead of starting from scratch.
- Average hours per RFP and questionnaire dropped 54% (from 13.6 to 6.2 hours) freeing time for demos and other high-value presales work.
- Total RFP and questionnaire hours dropped 72%, illustrating to leadership how much Responsive AI freed up the SC team for other activities.
- AI-assisted projects increased 8x, from 6% to 51%.
- Manual reporting was replaced with automated AI dashboards, generated in about 15 minutes using Responsive Platform analytics.
The frustration before: Knowledge existed, but it was unusable
The Solutions Consulting team at BlueConic, the AI-powered Customer Growth Engine for B2C brands, responds to every RFP, RFI, and security questionnaire submitted to the company. As request volume increased, this work steadily pulled time away from revenue-generating activities such as tailored product demos.
As BlueConic accelerates its AI-first transformation, the team also focused on operationalizing AI in day-to-day work, starting with the highest-volume presales workflows.
Justin Walsh, Solutions Consultant at BlueConic, saw AI as a way to help the team scale without adding headcount, but only if the output could be trusted. Accuracy, consistency, and AI-generated answers grounded in approved knowledge were non-negotiable.
Unfortunately, in a fast-moving software environment, content gets stale quickly, and BlueConic had not updated its Responsive Content Library in a few years by the time Justin came on board. Much of the content was outdated and many Q&A pairs were duplicates. Because of this, only 16% of answers came from the library, so the team had to spend hours rewriting content they had already created.
Compounding the problem, due to all of the manual work the team was doing, there was little data available to show leadership how presales work contributed to sales outcomes.
Organizing content to be AI-ready
In Q3 2024, Justin led a multi-week cleanup effort of BlueConic’s Content Library that included:
- Automatically identifying and removing duplicate and outdated Q&A pairs to prevent inaccurate AI outputs
- Rewriting content for clarity and consistency, including short- and long-form answers
- Tapping into Responsive Business Intelligence to building dashboards to track content usage and identify gaps, answering the question, “What are we searching for but not finding?”
By the next quarter, Content Library usage doubled. It more than doubled again in Q1 2025, peaking at 74%. It was a real-life example of The Field of Dreams’ “If you build it, they will come.” Working from a single source of approved content that was easy to find and trust, Solutions Consultants leapt at the opportunity to write less and review more. The updated Content Library has also become a welcoming environment for content-generation features in the Responsive Platform, such as AI Draft.
In late 2024, BlueConic evaluated several AI tools to help the Solutions Consulting team, but Responsive AI beat out all competitors. As an engineered AI that draws only from approved content, other solutions with GenAI wrappers could not deliver acceptable levels of accuracy, consistency, or trust.
“Cleaning up the content wasn’t glamorous, but it was the backbone of everything that followed. You need to feed AI quality content in order to get quality content back.”
Justin Walsh
Solutions Consultant at BlueConic
Igniting efficiency by combining AI and approved content
Before fully onboarding Responsive AI, BlueConic tested AI-generated drafts against 10-15 previously won RFPs. The SC team compared AI responses question-by-question with human-written answers to ensure quality, accuracy, and relevance met internal benchmarks before scaling usage.
“We compared the quality of Responsive AI output to what one of our team members could produce manually, and Responsive AI far exceeded our benchmarks.”
Justin Walsh
Solutions Consultant at BlueConic
Within one quarter of enabling Responsive AI, BlueConic saw dramatic efficiency gains:
- AI-assisted responses increased from 6% to 51%.
- First drafts for RFP and questionnaire responses were generated in minutes through natural language prompting of Responsive AI.
- The SC team responded to individual questions 61% faster on average without sacrificing quality.
TRACE Score™ and source citations accelerated review cycles by giving Solutions Consultants a clear, 0-100 confidence indicator tied to accuracy and source relevance. High-scoring answers could be quickly approved, allowing the team to focus human effort on responses that needed refinement.
Measuring the impact of Responsive AI
Metric | Before | After | Outcome |
Content Library usage | 16% | 54–74% | 3x increase |
AI-assisted projects | 6% | 51% | 8x increase |
Avg. minutes per question | 6.5 | 2.5 | 61% faster |
Total hours per RFP | 245 | 68 | 72% reduction |
Avg hours per RFP | 13.6 | 6.2 | 54% faster |
Smarter responses, faster sales, and data-driven ROI from operationalizing Responsive AI
By treating knowledge as a strategic asset and Responsive AI as an amplifier, BlueConic achieved monumental operational optimization in its RFP process, supporting BlueConic’s broader shift to an AI-first way of operating. In addition to showing efficiency gains, Justin clearly demonstrated how the team directly influences revenue outcomes, from time savings to faster sales cycles and stronger conversion metrics.
The team reclaimed hours each week that they could redirect toward product demos and other high-value selling activities. That shift translated into measurable improvement in the metrics leadership cares about most: demo-to-win and proposal-to-win ratios. No single metric tells the full story, but pairing operational efficiency with downstream indicators gives leadership the context they need to understand true business impact.
Response quality improved as well. Responsive AI identifies the most accurate and relevant content, synthesizes an answer based on the question and audience, and tailors every response to an RFP, RFI, or security questionnaire.
“It’s a huge win, both for us — because it saves time writing and tailoring responses for every proposal — and for our customers, who are getting better responses out of us each time.”
Justin Walsh
Solutions Consultant at BlueConic
BlueConic’s journey shows what becomes possible when AI is operationalized with intention: knowledge management becomes lighter, teams stay focused on high-value customer conversations, and leadership gets a clear view of impact. With Responsive AI, the Solutions Consulting team automated manual drafting and content management, quantified results for the business, and built a smarter, faster, more connected way to work.
What began as an effort to accelerate RFP responses has become a proof point for BlueConic’s broader AI-first operating model. The same principles apply beyond presales: trusted first-party data and governed knowledge power AI that helps customers drive growth and measurable outcomes at scale.
