Cassidy vs. Zapier

AI Automation Platform vs RFP-Specific Software

Most RFP tools, like Responsive (formerly RFPIO), follow a rigid structure that helps teams fill out questionnaires and manage proposal content. However, no two RFP processes are the same. Cassidy takes a different approach by allowing teams to build custom AI-powered workflows tailored to their exact needs. This flexibility extends beyond RFPs to sales enablement, customer support, and other business functions.

Instead of locking teams into a fixed system, Cassidy adapts to how your team works and ensures AI-powered automations get smarter over time. With Cassidy, RFP automation is just one piece of a larger AI strategy. Your knowledge base fuels multiple workflows, including drafting sales emails, triaging support tickets, and enriching CRM data. Rather than siloing knowledge across different AI tools, Cassidy keeps everything in one system, making it easier to scale automation across the entire organization.

Here is a breakdown of how Cassidy and Responsive compare and why a flexible AI platform is the smarter investment for enterprises.

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AI That Adapts to Your Workflow, Not the Other Way Around

Every company handles RFPs differently, yet many tools take a one-size-fits-all approach. Responsive is designed around structured proposal workflows that help teams quickly fill in responses using an existing content library. This speeds up the process but follows a predefined structure, requiring teams to work within a set system.

Cassidy takes a more flexible approach. Instead of following a fixed template, Cassidy allows teams to customize every part of the process. AI-generated responses, workflow steps, and automation rules can all be tailored to match the unique way each team operates. Whether automating RFPs, summarizing documents, or handling customer support inquiries, Cassidy adapts to your specific needs.

With Cassidy, AI becomes a true automation engine that evolves with your business. Teams can:
✅ Customize AI outputs to ensure responses match their brand and tone
✅ Choose from multiple AI models like GPT-4 and Claude for different types of tasks
✅ Build workflows that combine AI-powered data extraction, analysis, and response generation

Responsive is built for proposal teams, while Cassidy offers a broader AI-powered automation platform that scales across multiple workflows. For enterprises looking to expand AI beyond RFPs, Cassidy provides a more flexible and future-proof solution.

AI Assistants vs. Lookup-Based AI

One of the biggest differences between Cassidy and Responsive is how teams interact with AI.

Cassidy provides fully customizable AI Assistants that can be trained for any specific task. Whether acting as a content copilot that ensures responses are in your exact brand voice or an AI that automatically replies to emails for your sales team, Cassidy’s Assistants adapt to each team’s needs. They can be embedded in Slack, Microsoft Teams, Chrome, CRMs, and more, allowing employees to ask questions, generate content, or complete tasks instantly. Unlike rigid chatbots, these Assistants understand context, pull from company knowledge, and take action in real time.

Responsive’s AI works more like a smart lookup tool. Instead of a free-form assistant that users can chat with, Responsive’s AI is designed to retrieve RFP content when proposal managers need it. When working on an RFP, the AI searches the content library, suggests relevant answers, and can auto-fill responses. This makes it useful for quickly handling repetitive questions, but it doesn’t function as an AI assistant that can handle broader business tasks.

While Responsive’s AI is embedded in the RFP process, it lacks the flexibility of Cassidy’s Assistants, which can be custom-built for different roles and deployed across multiple workflows. Whether teams need a sales AI to draft outreach emails, a support bot to answer customer FAQs, or a compliance assistant to review policies, Cassidy provides the AI-powered copilots that teams can rely on every day.

Enterprise Knowledge: A Smart System for All AI Tools, Not Just RFPs

AI is only as powerful as the knowledge it can access. Cassidy gives enterprises a single, centralized knowledge base that connects documents, wikis, CRM data, and support tickets to power multiple AI-driven workflows. Instead of siloing data across different AI tools, Cassidy lets teams build and deploy AI assistants for sales, support, operations, and more, all pulling from the same up-to-date system.

Responsive’s knowledge is built only for RFPs. Its Content Library stores past responses and approved Q&A pairs, ensuring accuracy for proposals but limiting its usefulness elsewhere. Other teams can’t easily repurpose this data, forcing companies to rely on separate tools for sales emails, customer support, and internal workflows, creating more silos instead of reducing them.

With Cassidy, knowledge isn’t just stored, it is actively used to automate processes across teams. Enterprises can quickly spin up new AI tools without rebuilding from scratch, making AI smarter, more consistent, and easier to manage at scale.

Choose AI That Grows With Your Business

Cassidy is built for enterprises that want AI-powered automation across multiple teams and workflows, not just RFPs. It provides the flexibility to build custom AI assistants and workflows that scale with your organization, ensuring knowledge stays connected and automation gets smarter over time.

Responsive is a strong choice for companies that need a structured tool specifically for RFPs, proposals, and sales questionnaires. However, if your goal is to consolidate AI efforts, avoid data silos, and automate more than just one function, Cassidy offers a more powerful and future-proof solution.

Overview

LLMs created a new era of automation. While previous workflow automation platforms could only automate tasks with basic if/then logic, LLMs unlocked complex reasoning in natural language.  

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However, the quality of LLM outputs and decisions is highly dependent on the specific context they’re given. Insufficient, disorganized, or outdated data can cause AI to respond inconsistently (or even hallucinate), making it hugely unreliable for business automation. Enter: Cassidy. 

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Cassidy is a more intelligent automation platform that makes every decision with full context on your business. 

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How it works: Cassidy’s knowledge base connects to your company’s existing knowledge tools (Slack, Notion, Drive, etc.) and automatically cleans, prepares and keeps your business’s data up-to-date. It removes the concept of “one-size-fits-all” logic and instead allows your team to reliably build powerful AI workflows that make complex, human-level decisions, all with a nuanced understanding of your company. 

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Cassidy was built for both non-technical and technical users, making effective AI automations accessible to teams of all shapes and sizes. Today, we’re thrilled to announce our $3.7 million funding led by The General Partnership, Neo, Comma Capital, Spacecadet Ventures, Ride Ventures, and angels like Erik Goldman (Co-founder of Vanta), Jason Dorfman (CEO of Orum), Zach Sims (CEO of Codecademy). We closed our round in November 2023 and have been growing fast...

What makes Cassidy’s automations ‘intelligent’

Companies typically want to consolidate their tooling, and since Cassidy's workflows are tailored to how a business operates, it works ‘intelligently’ in a few different ways: 

It gets smarter with more interactions

Cassidy’s automations improve over time. Each interaction cites its sources, allowing you to verify and exclude specific information through human-in-the-loop processes. This transparency ensures your data remains accurate and up-to-date. As more interactions occur, Cassidy’s performance is refined, incorporating added context and prompt adjustments to continually enhance the system’s reliability.

It understands your business

Cassidy connects with all knowledge tools (Slack, Sharepoint, Confluence, etc.) to give AI context on your business, customers, competitors, brand voice, and more. It pulls the information in real-time so that it’s constantly up-to-date with what’s happening at your company and in the market. This gives Cassidy human-like judgment, and keeps responses consistent across your entire team.

It’s fully composable software

Cassidy allows teams to quickly build custom AI automations and agents. Companies can tailor the software to how their business operates, designing workflows that match their exact team’s processes. We're creating hundreds of AI action blocks combined with all the leading AI models (all included with your plan) so you can bring your AI tech stack into a unified platform. 

AI that can run asynchronously

Cassidy’s workflows allow you to build automations that run even while you’re sleeping. You can create triggers from hundreds of different tools to automate tasks automatically. Because our AI runs with specific guardrails and the full context of your company, you can trust it to perform reliably without needing a human in the loop.

Built for teams of all shapes and sizes

We're making AI automations accessible to teams of all sizes and skill sets. To stay ahead in the age of AI, automation is no longer optional—everyone needs to be able to build out automations. Cassidy is designed to make it incredibly easy for non-technical teams to use and build complex automations. We offer a library of pre-made workflows and a simple text-to-workflow creation process. For more technical teams and granular use cases, Cassidy has the flexibility to add code and prompt engineering. Cassidy also has enterprise-grade permissioning and security that you can trust to keep your data private and encrypted. You can set advanced user-level permissions for your automations and knowledge data to keep your data secure. Learn more about our security (including compliance with SOC II) at trust.cassidyai.com. 

Cassidy in the real world 

We started Cassidy a little over a year ago and are continuously blown away by our customers’ creativity, from startup founders automating responses to RFPs to global public companies automating their sales enablement flows for 12k+ companies. Some use cases to spotlight: 

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RVezy is a leader in online RV rentals that built a suite of sales enablement and customer success automations. Since their business model and ideal customer persona are incredibly nuanced, they couldn’t rely on typical if/then logic or scoring criteria to prioritize and respond to customers. The team embedded Cassidy into their workflows to automate customer support triaging, handle chargeback disputes, and draft replies with highly nuanced context. These automations understand RVezy’s business inside-out and make high-context judgments for each ticket trained on thousands of previous support inquiries.

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“Cassidy allows us to be much more proactive in addressing critical customer complaints - automatically escalating issues to a manager who can solve customer problems quickly”

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E78 Partners, a leading advisory firm, utilizes Cassidy's AI automations for research and knowledge transfer across teams. They've built automations that are hyper-personalized to support industry research and client facing projects.

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"Cassidy personalizes its AI tools to know our business, clients, and industries better than any other AI-enabled company. Across the board, our team is obsessed with using Cassidy as a copilot to refine solutions, research external industry insights, streamline knowledge transfer across teams and find creative ways to automate the day-to-day monotonous tasks."

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Lexer, a customer data platform, generates responses to RFPs in minutes. Their team created an AI workflow that extracts questions from documents, searches their knowledge base for answers, then writes a thorough response in Lexer’s brand voice.

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“I never thought I’d be able to automate responding to our RFPs until I found Cassidy. It was incredibly easy to connect my tools, and helps us respond 3x faster to customers so we can close more deals.”

What’s next

At Cassidy, we believe AI is going to become more and more embedded into how companies operate, starting with automations. If what we’re building resonates, check out our many open roles at cassidyai.com/careers 👈

There are two primary categories for integrating AI into your business:

1. Boosting Internal Productivity - In other words, figuring out how to make your employees and workflows more efficient, so you can deliver better results faster.
2. Enhancing the Customer Experience - Exploring what you can offer on top of your existing products and services to make your customers even happier.

Focusing on internal productivity will help cut costs, while improving the customer experience will help you earn more.

Internal Productivity

In my view, it’s easier to start with internal productivity. Greater AI adoption within your team or even by yourself will lead to a substantial increase in overall productivity. The right AI strategy will turn everyone in your organization into a top performer.

Of course, figuring out the best AI strategy can be tricky. But, I think it’s important to not overthink it. Just starting to use AI tools and sharing them with your team can pave the way for in-depth AI integration across your organization. It’s crucial for everyone to have that “Aha” moment with AI.

At CassidyAI, we’re all about this mission. While we’re still slowly rolling out early access, we’ve been documenting our process publicly because we believe everyone can benefit from the thinking we’re putting into how to build features that truly speed up internal workflows.

We showcased our plugin feature that allows you to bring an AI assistant, custom-trained for your business, virtually anywhere on the internet. It’s been a game-changer for sales, customer success, and marketing teams.

(Check out the demo here. You can also signup for the Cassidy waitlist here)

The point is this: When integrating AI into your business, consider the workflows and tasks that currently exist and explore how AI could be introduced to enhance them. Never assume AI can't help--even small steps towards incorporating AI eventually become meaningful time savings.

Customer Experience

On the other hand, you can drive significant customer retention and growth by thoughtfully using AI in your products and services. This approach requires creativity, as it is not as simple as purchasing an off-the-shelf solution for internal workflow optimization.

AI-enabled features in your products and services could include personalized recommendations, an AI chatbot, or simple AI features that make it easier for people to use your product. The catch is that these features must be unique to your business.

For instance, Shopify customers struggled to optimize their stores properly, so their AI sidekick was developed to do it automatically. Another example: I recently spoke with a personal trainer who introduced an AI chatbot for fitness-related questions because clients struggled with guidance on days they weren’t seeing the trainer.

When considering AI implementation, think about the biggest pain points for your current customers. Why do people churn? Is something stopping them from using your product or service more often? What are their unmet needs?

It’s within these questions, you’ll find opportunities to enhance the customer experience using AI.