How Navan Increased RFP Output 4x With Arphie

Navan’s sales team had years on Responsive, a legacy RFP tool, but the cracks kept showing:

1. Product capabilities were falling short. For example, keyword search and autofill consistently missed the mark, leading to significant time spent searching for answers in the library.
2. ‍Feature overload without practical AI. The team realized they didn’t need more bells and whistles, they needed an AI-native tool that actually worked.
3. ‍Unintuitive workflows created an internal help-desk burden. Instead of accelerating work, the legacy tool’s complexity meant the RFP leader became the go-to software support contact for reps, answering how to questions and hand holding through basic steps.

The tipping point came when a mission-critical RFP became impossible to complete in time.

“We didn’t have time to finish the RFP even with our existing RFP response tool. And that was like a five-alarm fire going off. We knew we had to start looking for a better way to do it.”
- Rachael McDaniel, Senior Manager, Global Proposals

Navan needed a solution that was intuitive and actually worked by producing trustworthy drafts and enabling cross-functional collaboration.

As Navan is the leader in the Corporate Travel Management space, it was critical to the Navan team to also work with the leader in the RFP response space. However, the issue was that there were many options to choose from, all claiming to do similar things. 

Navan ran a trial evaluating multiple solutions, including Loopio, Arphie, and several other AI-native tools. At the end of the day, the decision came down to two key decision criteria: does it work, and will they support us? 

The answer quickly became clear: 

• Arphie produced AI first drafts that actually worked. Not only was the initial answer set the “best”, but Arphie also had strong drafting and re-prompting capabilities that consistently generated strong, usable answers. In contrast, on other platforms, re-prompting broke the flow and / or delivered inconsistent results. 

“If you wanted to change the prompt and rerun it… other tools would start to struggle. With Arphie, the first drafts were strong, and re-prompting actually worked.”
- Erik Nelson, Major Account Executive

A partner, not just a vendor. Arphie distinguished itself during the POC by deeply understanding Navan’s workflow and quickly acting on their feedback. When the team mentioned a feature they’d be interested in, Arphie shipped it within a day — demonstrating responsiveness and commitment to Navan’s needs.

The impact was clear within the first quarter:

• 4x more throughput. “Within just three months since the launch of Arphie, we ran through the same number of RFPs we did in a whole year with Responsive.”
  
• A burden lifted. What had once been an AE’s most dreaded task became a burden lifted, transforming the process into one that reps described as “genuinely delightful”.‍
• No more bottlenecks. Reps were able to self-serve RFP responses without relying on the RFP lead for constant support due to Arphie’s intuitiveness.