'Artificial intelligence can only augment human efforts'

AI is a tool that can only augment the efforts of human beings to turn the work around in a much shorter period of time, said Manish Bafna, SVP - Engineering, Responsive (formerly RFPIO). Human involvement still plays a crucial role in the entire chain of events, he said.

Responsive uses AI to help organisations streamline and automate the creation of winning responses to complex information requests.

Delivering a lighting talk on 'Winning with GenAI: Faster responses at enterprise scale' at Devsparks Chennai, YourStory's platform for the developer community, Bafna highlighted how human intelligence plays a key role in getting the best of artificial intelligence platforms.

Giving the example of the Responsive, which provides an AI platform to manage the process of request for proposal, Bafna said the company believes in having a human in the loop in the entire process of RFP submission, be it drafting, reviewing or finalising.

RFP is a crucial document that has the potential to a make or break situation for enterprises. A single error can even mean losing a contract. Responsive uses the term 'strategic response management' wherein it goes through the entire process in a step-by-step manner.

Bafna emphasised that Responsive has five parameters to check whether the data that is entered into the RFP is accurate or not: trustworthiness, accuracy, relevance, completion and explainability.

Given the voluminous and stringent requirements of an RFP, people feeding in their response are generally cautious about automating this process through AI, as they generally do not trust the data. It is under such an environment, Bafna said, that human intelligence plays a vital role, and AI can help get the work done more accurately.

Given the sensitive nature of RFP where critical data is put in through automated platforms, Responsive adopts the highest standards of governance on maintaining information security and information. This provides the comfort level for clients, he said.