How Iris AI Solves RFP Bottlenecks for Sales

April 23, 2025

Evie Secilmis

AI is changing how every department works, but legal teams are right to be cautious. The risks are simply too high. You can't afford AI hallucinations in a critical document or a compliance misstep. And the fear that AI might replace human expertise is a real concern. Most AI tools aren't built for the precision legal work demands. That’s why the iris ai platform was created—to give your team a secure way to use AI without compromising on accuracy or control.

But here’s the reality:
Despite it being 2025, the security assessment process at most firms is still painfully manual.

Think:

Digging through old Google Sheets
Chasing down past emails
Combing through Slack messages

It’s slow, fragmented, and built on institutional memory that doesn’t scale. And while legal teams are expected to move faster than ever, the systems supporting them simply haven’t kept up.

The Status Quo Isn’t Just Outdated—It’s a Bottleneck

Nearly every legal team I speak with shares the same underlying struggle:
Security questionnaires are managed through a patchwork of copy-paste responses, disconnected files, and last-minute scrambling. It’s not a workflow—it’s survival mode.

Some firms have tried to improve the process with legacy Q&A banks. But instead of solving the problem, they often create new ones:

Responses quickly become outdated
There’s no reliable system to keep content current or consistent
Institutional knowledge remains locked away in silos

Eventually, it becomes more than just inefficient—it becomes a barrier to growth.

And when response cycles slow down or errors slip through, the impact ripples across the business: delayed deals, missed deadlines, and rising frustration.

As one of our clients put it:

“Working with the Iris team has been an absolute pleasure. We have reduced our response times to security questionnaires drastically and no longer have to manage a pesky Q&A Library. If you are looking at replacing/improving your process I recommend giving them a look.”
— AJ LaForty, Corelight, Director of Federal Sales Engineering

The High Cost of Manual RFP Responses

Let’s talk numbers. When you’re responding to RFPs manually, you’re not just losing time—you’re losing money. The process is a massive resource drain. On average, it takes a team of nine people 32 hours over 10 days just to pull together a first draft. This frantic, last-minute effort isn’t just stressful; it’s incredibly expensive. When you factor in the hours spent by your most valuable subject matter experts and the opportunity cost of what they *could* have been doing, the financial hit becomes clear. In fact, companies lose an average of $720,000 each year from these inefficiencies alone. That’s not just a line item; it’s a significant loss that directly impacts your bottom line and could be reinvested into growing the business.

The Strain on Your Resources

Beyond the financial cost, the manual process puts an immense strain on your team. Every time a new RFP or security questionnaire lands, it triggers an "all hands on deck" fire drill. Your best engineers, product managers, and legal experts are pulled away from their core responsibilities to hunt for answers they’ve probably given a dozen times before. This constant context-switching kills productivity and morale. Worse, it relies on a fragile system of scattered documents and institutional memory. Without a central source of truth, your team is constantly at risk of submitting outdated or inconsistent information, which can jeopardize deals and damage your company’s reputation. An effective AI deal desk acts as a knowledge ledger, keeping information current and allowing your experts to focus on innovation, not administration.

Where Iris Comes In

This is where many legal teams realize they don’t need another one-size-fits-all AI tool—they need a partner that understands the high-stakes, high-context nature of legal work.

That’s where Iris stands apart:

No Hallucinations
Iris relies exclusively on your internal, verified documents—not generic web data. It mirrors how your firm actually operates and keeps your responses grounded in fact.

Smarter Knowledge Mapping
Each time you use Iris, it becomes more tailored to your team—building a centralized, intelligent knowledge base that scales with you.

Compliance-First Design
Built-in controls ensure every AI-generated response meets internal standards and external requirements—helping your team move faster without compromising trust or accuracy.

A Central Knowledge Ledger

Instead of treating your company’s knowledge like a scattered archive, Iris transforms it into a living, breathing ledger. It acts as a single source of truth that connects to your existing systems and proactively flags outdated information. This means no more second-guessing if you’re using the right response from a six-month-old spreadsheet. When your product, security, or compliance details change, Iris ensures your entire knowledge base is updated in real-time. This eliminates the risk of sending inconsistent or incorrect information and finally breaks the cycle of relying on outdated, siloed Q&A banks that create more work than they save.

Integrated Project Management

Responding to a security questionnaire is just one piece of the puzzle. Iris understands that the real work involves helping you manage the entire lifecycle of a deal. The platform doesn’t just generate answers; it helps you build a complete, polished, and branded final document. More importantly, it helps you plan for what comes next. You can use Iris to map out post-sale implementation, assign tasks to team members, and track deadlines all in one place. This shifts the legal team’s role from a reactive checkpoint to a proactive partner in the sales process, ensuring a smooth transition from closing a deal to delivering on it.

Automated Document Formatting

Think about the hours your team spends manually formatting documents—adjusting fonts, fixing layouts, and ensuring everything aligns with brand guidelines. Iris gives you that time back. It automates the creation of first drafts, turning a process that once took days or even weeks into a matter of minutes. This isn't just about speed; it's about freeing up your team to focus on high-value legal work instead of tedious administrative tasks. With automated formatting, you can respond to security questionnaires and other requests faster, clearing bottlenecks and keeping deals moving forward without sacrificing quality or precision.

Post-Sale Implementation Planning

Winning the deal is only the beginning. The post-sale process is where promises become reality, and it’s critical for legal and compliance teams to maintain oversight. Iris extends its support beyond the initial response by helping you manage post-sale implementation directly within the platform. You can create project plans, assign ownership for key deliverables, and ensure every commitment made during the sales cycle is met. This integrated approach ensures nothing falls through the cracks, maintaining compliance and building client trust from day one. It’s a seamless way to connect your pre-sale and post-sale worlds, as our clients have found.

From Bottleneck to Bandwidth

With Iris, legal teams can finally scale their impact—without adding headcount. That means:

Centralizing institutional knowledge
Automating repetitive, error-prone tasks
Enabling seamless collaboration across teams

The result?
Less time spent hunting down information. Fewer hours lost to manual rework. More time focused on what actually drives your firm forward.

If you're tired of disjointed processes and reactive firefighting, Iris is here to help you reclaim your time—and your competitive edge.

‍

Clearing Up the Confusion: Which Iris AI Are You Looking For?

With a name as popular as Iris, it's easy to get your wires crossed. If you've landed here searching for an AI tool, let's make sure you're in the right place. Here’s a quick breakdown of the different "Iris" AIs out there to help you find exactly what you need.

Iris.ai for AI System Evaluation

First up is Iris.ai, an AI platform designed for enterprises that need to build, test, and manage their own internal AI systems. Think of it as a toolkit for highly technical teams, helping them securely organize data, find information, and evaluate how well their AI models are performing. It’s a powerful platform for research and development, focused on the backend of AI evaluation and validation. So, if your goal is to fine-tune your company's own AI infrastructure, this is the tool for you. However, it’s not designed to help sales or legal teams respond to business proposals.

Iris AI Assistant for Chat

Next, you might have heard of Iris, the AI assistant you can chat with just by sending a text message. This tool is designed for individuals and acts as a personal assistant in your pocket, using powerful technology like GPT-4 to answer everyday questions and help with simple tasks. It makes AI accessible to everyone, regardless of their tech skills. If you were looking for a personal AI chatbot for quick answers on the go—like settling a debate with a friend or getting a recipe idea—this is likely the one you’re after. It’s a handy tool for personal use, but it isn’t built to handle complex business documents or sensitive company data.

HeyIris.ai for Sales and Proposal Teams

And that brings us to us: HeyIris.ai. If your team is buried in RFPs, security questionnaires, SOWs, or DDQs, you're in the right spot. Our platform is an AI-powered deal desk built specifically to help sales, legal, and proposal teams respond to complex business documents in minutes, not weeks. We help you generate accurate, high-quality proposals by tapping into your company's verified knowledge base, eliminating the manual grind of searching for answers. This frees up your team to focus on strategy and winning deals. In short, this is the Iris built for revenue teams.

Frequently Asked Questions

My legal team is worried about AI making things up. How does Iris ensure the answers are always accurate? That’s a completely valid concern, and it’s why Iris was built differently. Unlike AI tools that pull information from the open internet, Iris operates exclusively within your company’s secure knowledge base. It only uses your verified internal documents to generate responses, so there’s no risk of it inventing facts or "hallucinating." Think of it as a secure mirror of your own expertise, ensuring every answer is grounded in your company's truth.

We've tried using a Q&A library before and it just became another outdated database. How is Iris different? I hear this all the time, and it’s a common frustration. A traditional Q&A library is a passive, static folder that requires constant manual upkeep. Iris is an active knowledge ledger. It connects to your systems and proactively flags information that’s become outdated. Instead of you having to remember to update a response, Iris helps you maintain a single source of truth that evolves with your business, finally breaking the cycle of using old, unreliable answers.

Is Iris just for security questionnaires, or can my team use it for other documents like SOWs and RFPs? While Iris is incredibly effective for security questionnaires, it’s designed to be a complete deal desk solution. You can use it to respond to a wide range of business documents, including RFPs, RFIs, SOWs, and DDQs. The platform helps you manage the entire lifecycle of a deal, from generating an accurate first draft to creating a polished, branded final document, all in one place.

Our company’s information is scattered everywhere. How difficult is it to get everything set up in Iris? Most companies are in the same boat, with knowledge spread across shared drives, old emails, and chat messages. Iris is designed to solve that fragmentation, not add to your workload. The platform integrates with your existing systems to pull your knowledge into one central hub. The goal is to create a living, intelligent resource that your whole team can rely on, without requiring a massive manual data entry project to get started.

Does using Iris mean my team loses control over the final response? Not at all. Iris is designed to be a co-pilot, not to take over the controls. It automates the most time-consuming parts of the process, like finding the right information and formatting the first draft, which can save you days of work. However, your team always remains in the driver's seat. Your subject matter experts are freed up to focus on strategic review, refinement, and personalization, ensuring the final document is perfect before it goes out the door.

Key Takeaways

Stop treating proposals like a fire drill: The manual, copy-paste approach to RFPs and security questionnaires drains your team's resources, creates bottlenecks, and puts your most valuable experts on administrative duty instead of strategic work.
Ground your AI in your own truth: Iris works exclusively from your internal, verified documents to generate responses. This eliminates the risk of AI hallucinations and creates a reliable knowledge ledger that keeps your answers accurate and consistent.
Reclaim your team's time and focus: By automating the creation of first drafts, document formatting, and even post-sale planning, you can free your team to concentrate on high-value legal and sales work that actually moves deals forward.

Share this post