Tribble, a generative artificial intelligence company that helps automate the tedious request-for-proposal process for sales and security teams, today announced the launch of a new analytics capability for its customers aimed at enhancing AI responses and understanding performance.

Large enterprise sales teams can end up responding to hundreds or more requests for proposals daily, which is the tedious information-gathering part of sales where customers reach out to competing vendors to determine which solution will best fit their needs.

Although many of the questions within these requests are similar, making them possible to automate, not all are quite the same. Many require industry-specific knowledge and specialized information that can only be sourced from within a company’s documentation to answer a customer’s particular requirements based on regulatory or other concerns. A single RFP can take a proposal manager or team 30 minutes on a short one or days on a long one to organize a reply.

“We look at Tribble as a digital expert teammate that joins the team of these companies, and the way that we manifested the product is primarily through a conversational interface like Slack or Teams or a Chrome extension,” co-founder and Chief Executive Sunil Rao told SiliconANGLE in an exclusive interview.

To do this, Rao said, the Tribble Agent is personified as a member of the team, taking the role of the sales engineer and the proposal manager. The idea is to take as much of the time and energy as possible off the plate of these particular employees when they’re working on proposals by helping them answer questions from customers. Tribble can work alongside sales engineers and proposal managers by providing them answers or completely automate the process workflow as much as possible by providing RFP help.

Today, Tribble announced a new analytics capability that allows the company’s customers to “pop the hood,” as Rao put it. He said a lot of Tribble’s customers use the product not just to answer questions for RFPs or automate their completion, but also to answer one-off questions for their customers during sales processes. This new capability, called Tribblytics – a portmanteau of Tribble and analytics – lets users get a deeper dive into how the platform is being used.

“It might just be that someone’s asking a very deep technical question about whether or not you can operate within retail whether or not you have a specific capability,” Rao explained. “We answer those questions, and we then, on the back end, can present back analytics to our customers about what are the kinds of questions people constantly are asking.”

Rao said many of Tribble’s customers interact with the agent similarly to how they would a sales engineer, whose role is to be the technical expert for products. Generally, he noted, there’s a shortage of sales engineers and the ratio between engineers and salespeople is about one to four. With Tribble able to answer easy technical questions, it frees up technical experts to join presentations and put their energy elsewhere, augmenting the sales teams even more.

The analytics backend also provides the marketing team with an idea of what part of their work is actionable. The questions being asked to their sales team can give them a better idea of what assets they have been putting money and time into have been seen and get out to potential customers. The types and wording of questions asked to Tribble provide an idea of how customers have been educated about a product.

Tribble’s responses can also be refined and ranked by end users who can reply with the proverbial thumbs up or thumbs down. When they do, the agent follows up with a conversation asking about what was not correct and what it can do next time to fix it.

Rao said this is a very human way of interacting so that it can refine its responses so that it can learn from its mistakes. This feedback also surfaces in the backend for customers to decide if they want to incorporate the response into Tribble’s “brain.”

Since its launch on May 16, Tribble has reached a milestone of 125,000 interactions with its platform. Each interaction with the agent contributes to the knowledge that it has, allowing it to refine its response capabilities and adapt to various RFP formats and industry-specific requirements, the company said.

“Imagine if someone at a single company had seen and responded to thousands of RFPs — that person probably gained more experience than some sales engineers have seen in an entire career,” said co-founder Ray Shipley. “Since we launched Tribble, we’ve seen so many variations of RFPs and Infosecs that can equal some of the best-trained people in this space.”

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