Novara's SE team uses Inventive AI to answer product RFPs and security questionnaires from live product documentation.
.webp)
The same five solutions engineers cover the jump in volume.
Outdated answers trace back to the exact document to fix.
Runs on SharePoint, Salesforce, Slack and SSO.
For Novara, the safety and operational risk software company behind the Flex platform, enterprise RFPs and IT security questionnaires were suddenly arriving far more often. Its five-person solutions engineering team was used to a couple of RFPs a year, not 75-100. With Inventive AI, the team drafts every answer from live product documentation instead of a folder of old responses. This case study is based on conversations with Dita Amtey and Arlo Amis, Solutions Engineers, and Nick Connor, VP of Technology and CISO, at Novara.
Novara builds Flex, a safety and operational risk management platform for industries such as construction, manufacturing, utilities, and oil and gas. A specialized five-person solutions engineering team answers its product RFPs and IT security questionnaires.
Novara's pre-sales team knew a wave of enterprise interest was coming, but its knowledge system wasn't built for it. Past responses were scattered across Word documents, PDFs and spreadsheets in one unsearchable drive.
"It's literally just a folder with folders within it of all of our different prospects that have reached out to us over the past few years. Everything from Word to PDF to Excel documents."
— Dita Amtey, Solutions Engineer, Novara
The team expected volume to jump to 75–100 proposals a year. Handling that by hand, especially repetitive IT security questionnaires, wasn't realistic for five people. And an answer pulled from a year-old RFP was likely to describe features that had since changed.
Leadership knew it needed AI to scale, but it had to work for enterprise pre-sales.
"Ethan just messaged me this morning and was like, 'How good is our enterprise ChatGPT in filling out RFPs?' So I told him we actually just bought a new tool."
— Arlo Amis, Solutions Engineer, Novara
After a competitive proof of concept, Novara chose Inventive AI for RFP automation for solutions engineers, making it the team’s central proposal engine.
When a security questionnaire arrives, the SE team drops it into Inventive AI, which drafts every answer from a curated SharePoint folder of live product documentation. Projects launch from Salesforce and access runs through SSO via Inventive's integrations, so the team kept its existing workflow.
For the wider sales team, the turning point was the Slack bot, which answers one-off customer questions on the spot.
"I just asked you, what is our uptime SLA? And we commit to 99.5% monthly uptime. So it's actually pulling from that source document because it's referencing how it's calculated."
— Nick Connor, VP of Technology and CISO, Novara
Inventive AI's drafts were often more thorough than the answers the SEs had time to write by hand.
"I've answered it a lot with just 'yes.' So this is more detail than I give a lot of the time."
— Arlo Amis, Solutions Engineer, Novara
It also fixed the stale data problem. Inventive AI gives answers with source citations, so when the team spots an outdated response, it can trace it to the SharePoint file, update that file once and keep the fix for every future proposal.
"As we identify responses that are outdated, we can source that response back to the document it got it from, so that we know what needs to be removed or updated."
— Arlo Amis, Solutions Engineer, Novara
Inventive AI helps solutions engineering teams answer RFPs and security questionnaires with accurate, cited answers from approved content.
Book a demo to see how Inventive AI handles questionnaires like Novara's.
