Cassidy vs. Glean

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.

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.

This might be the biggest opportunity in AI right now: take your industry expertise, apply new AI knowledge, and become the AI expert in your industry.

See, a recent McKinsey report stated that AI adoption in the workplace has actually remained stagnant from 2021 to 2023.

I believe that’s because most people have a general understanding of AI, but they have no idea how to use it in their specific industry. There’s a huge opportunity to become the person who shows people how to apply AI to your industry. Focus on teaching use cases actually relevant to their daily work.

The more niche you get, the bigger impact you can have.

How do you become the AI expert in your industry?

First, position yourself as the "AI Person" at your company. Share your learnings and experiments with colleagues and other people in your industry.

There's no shortage of people looking to make their lives easier. Start by helping those around you.

To take it a step further, share your insights online.

You know I love TikTok, but it doesn’t matter which platform you choose. TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, whatever. The steps are simple.

1. Learn about AI
2. Use it in your industry
3. Share online how you’re doing that.
4. Repeat for months-years

If your content is helpful and you do it for long enough, you’ll start to be seen as the AI expert for your industry. You'll have the opportunity to make a significant impact by applying the power of AI to address specific problems within your field.

Remember: every industry needs an AI expert, you can be it.