Background
Aibidia builds transfer pricing software for multinational enterprises, helping tax and finance teams manage compliance, documentation, and cross-team collaboration across jurisdictions. The company serves more than 100 multinational clients, including Nokia, Fujifilm and Remote, with an average client revenue of €7 billion, and manages over 7,000 international business entities on its platform.
The Challenge
Aibidia had run its RFP and security-questionnaire process through Loopio for about two years before Nikhil Kumar, Revenue Operations Director, joined. The idea behind it was sound: centralize the company's answers so RFPs could be handled faster. In practice, the tool became overhead rather than an accelerant.
A questionnaire would come in from a prospect, an Account Executive (AE) would upload it to Loopio, and the team would sort out what it could answer and what needed a human. Even a routine 50-question questionnaire could take two to three weeks, because so much of that time went into verifying what was still correct inside the tool, whilst also doing the day job. On a larger RFP, the team ended up rewriting most of the answers from scratch, and some reps gave up on Loopio altogether and just worked in Excel. Maintaining the knowledge library it depended on had, in effect, become its own job - Nikhil's.
"There's enough tech out there these days that it should be able to do that itself. I just wanted something that works, something I don't have to do heavy lifting for."
- Nikhil Kumar, Revenue Operations Director, Aibidia
Why Aibidia Chose Realm
What mattered most in the search for a replacement:
- Answers Aibidia could trust, with visible sourcing back to where they came from
- A tool the team could use to answer one-off questions from customers, not just structured questionnaires
- A fast, low-friction evaluation and a world-class buying process
- A partner willing to work closely with a fast-moving company
Realm's team was responsive and worked at Aibidia's pace which was something Nikhil appreciated. What is more, getting live took almost no time at all.
“Maybe half a day to set everything up properly, but the lift was incredibly light. I've been through onboardings that take weeks, if not months – this one just worked."
— Nikhil Kumar, Revenue Operations Director, Aibidia
Impact at Aibidia
RFP turnaround has collapsed. The same questionnaire that took 2-3 weeks when Nikhil joined in October is now completed during the same day. This is due to the fact that Realm now generates about 99% of Aibidia's RFP answers automatically, and roughly 90% survive review without a rewrite. The remaining 10% is customizing tone and content for the specific client or brand new things we’ve never been asked before.
Knowledge maintenance, once a recurring drain on Nikhil's time, is close to gone.
"It's really hard to quantify because it's basically nothing now. I don't spend time on knowledge maintenance. If I spend any time at all, it's maybe a minute a week: approving an RFP before it goes out."
— Nikhil Kumar, Revenue Operations Director, Aibidia
Aibidia also points to how Realm builds trust in its answers: by showing where they came from.
"A lot of AI tools give you an answer with full confidence. What Realm does differently is give you the source: click through and it takes you to the Slack post or the previous RFP question the answer came from. That's the real foundation of the confidence in the answer."
— Nikhil Kumar, Revenue Operations Director, Aibidia
That speed shows up in the sales cycle, too, as deals move faster since Aibidia adopted Realm. Getting back to customers several weeks sooner makes it easier to buy from them.
Realm's reach at Aibidia now extends well beyond RFPs. It drafts replies to support tickets synced from Salesforce, briefing the rep on the issue and any similar past cases. It's added automatically to every client Slack channel when a deal is created, picking up context without manual work. It also pulls account history for AEs and SDRs, builds deal rooms via Trumpet, and generates on-brand assets from the design handbook.
Nikhil also credits the relationship with Realm's team as a differentiator versus his experience with Loopio.
Looking Ahead
Nikhil's advice for anyone with a legacy RFP tool coming up for renewal is blunt.
"Switch to Realm, or at least give it a try. Switching from a static knowledge library to a tool that connects with your knowledge natively not only removes the maintenance burden, but results in high-quality first-pass answers to almost all RFP questions. The time your team doesn't have to spend on these manual mundane tasks allows them to have more face-time with customers, and win more deals."
— Nikhil Kumar, Revenue Operations Director, Aibidia