How EXL built a company-wide growth engine by embedding Responsive AI into everyday work

The gist

At EXL, Strategic Response Management (SRM), the people, practices, and technology that unlock organizational knowledge for profitable growth, began in the Healthcare Industry Market Unit (IMU). That unit’s solutioning and bid management team needed to tackle a familiar problem: too many requests, too many contributors, and no shared system to scale responses.

What they built went far beyond a better RFP process. By integrating Responsive into day-to-day operations and tools such as Salesforce, Highspot, and Teams, EXL turned a standalone content repository into a global, AI-powered, company-wide growth engine. Today, it supports every client-facing interaction — from RFPs and RFIs to executive summaries, analyst questionnaires, proactive proposals, and ad hoc sales questions — all grounded in a single, trusted source of knowledge.

The rundown

EXL’s response challenge:

• Content lived in silos, making version control and consistency difficult to maintain at scale.
• Proposal collaboration relied heavily on manual coordination among large groups of subject matter experts (SMEs) who were already inundated with repeat requests, thereby slowing response times.
• Teams were often “starting over” for each RFP under tight timelines, chasing down previously used content and repeatedly asking SMEs the same questions. 

Impact and results

• Responsive AI is now embedded across Salesforce, HighSpot, and Teams — with Copilot and Claude soon to follow — making knowledge accessible to multiple EXL IMUs in the daily workflow. 
• AI workflows are scaled into a structured system that supports up to 50 contributors per project, with clear ownership and visibility.
• Centralized collaboration replaced fragmented communication, accelerating review cycles and improving response speed.
• AI adoption and improved collaboration have led to measurable impact, including 36% faster RFP submissions and 74% less time spent per RFP. 
• The healthcare solutioning and bid management team established a repeatable SRM model and has expanded it across global business units.

Why scale response management with Responsive

Before EXL could scale its response process, it had to confront a longtime challenge: knowledge existed, but it wasn’t accessible where work happened. EXL needed to centralize content and make it accessible via the systems that sales, solutioning, and proposal teams used every day.

At the same time, the complexity of EXL’s deals continued to grow. Pursuits involving dozens of contributors required constant coordination, yet collaboration happened across email threads, disconnected documents, and siloed tools. Deals were at risk due to delays, duplicated effort, inconsistent messaging, and heavy reliance on SMEs for even routine questions. To move faster and compete effectively, EXL needed to bring knowledge, collaboration, and execution into a single, connected system. 

A small team fuels a strategic engine

At the center of this transformation is the healthcare solutioning and bid management team, which is now recognized as a valued entity within the organization for its SRM domain expertise.

When Stephanie Benavidez, VP of Sales Enablement and Proposal Management, joined EXL, she recognized Responsive’s potential to solve knowledge fragmentation and fractured SME communications that were making responses to RFPs a slog. What emerged was something much larger. The approach her team built became the blueprint for scaling SRM into a company-wide growth engine.

Operating at the intersection of sales, solutioning, compliance, and delivery, her team became the connective tissue for knowledge across the healthcare IMU. They built repeatable workflows, governed content, trained teams, and introduced AI in practical ways that support every type of client-facing interaction, including RFPs, RFIs, RFQs, analyst questionnaires, executive summaries, proactive proposals, and real-time sales questions.

What started in healthcare has expanded globally, with Responsive becoming a shared system across all of EXL.

Honing pursuits through simpler collaboration in existing workflows

At EXL, large pursuits often require coordination across dozens of contributors, some with up to 50 SMEs bringing specialized input into a single response. Previously, that collaboration played out across email threads, shared documents, and disconnected tools. This resulted in slow progress, and it created confusion around ownership, versioning, and review cycles.

The shift came when the healthcare bid and solutioning team embedded Responsive directly into the systems teams already used, including Salesforce and Teams. Instead of forcing teams to change how they worked, they brought structured collaboration into existing workflows. Today, collaboration is centralized, visible, and — based on 36% faster RFP submissions and 74% less time spent per RFP — significantly faster:

• Work is assigned, tracked, and reviewed with AI-supported project management workflows, even across multiple contributors
• SMEs receive direct notifications and can act immediately without searching for context
• Conversations happen alongside content, and utilizing Responsive’s comment feature eliminates fragmented email chains
• Sellers and proposal teams can use Responsive Ask to access and use knowledge in real time within their existing tools
• The ability to export proposals into branded templates has saved the design team hours of work

This approach has become one of the most valued capabilities at EXL. By simplifying collaboration and embedding it into day-to-day workflows, the team has accelerated response times, reduced friction, and made even the most complex pursuits manageable at scale.

AI that complements every pursuit from end-to-end

EXL’s approach to AI is embedded, not layered on top. Responsive Ask conversational AI has become a core part of daily workflows, giving teams instant access to trusted knowledge. Whether answering a question on a call or refining a proposal response, users can retrieve and shape content in seconds. Additional AI capabilities the team uses include:

• The Answering Agent generates first drafts, so every pursuit starts closer to the finish line.
• The Fit Analysis Agent supports bid/no-bid decisions through automated summaries and requirements alignment.
• Intelligent search functionality identifies the right content within the right context based on hierarchical tags and other knowledge management capabilities.
• The Content Health Dashboard offers an at-a-glance view of content quality and coverage, enabling the team to identify industry trends and gaps, and assists with the overall cleanup and organization of the library.
• Compare-and-merge and deduplication capabilities help to refine and govern the knowledge base.

These capabilities ensure that EXL’s system improves as it grows. Content is continuously cleaned, consolidated, and strengthened, creating a feedback loop in which every response contributes to a stronger foundation.

Turning knowledge into a growth engine

As Responsive expands across EXL, the goal of simply accelerating responses in the healthcare IMU has evolved into making organizational knowledge available to everyone in their day-to-day workflows. 

As adoption grows, EXL is positioned to realize even greater benefits: faster response cycles, higher-quality client interactions, increased capacity without adding headcount, stronger alignment across teams and regions, and increased win rates. Strategic Response Management now connects teams, accelerates execution, and gives EXL a consistent, scalable way to compete, respond, win, and manage client relationships at enterprise scale.