Inside Rise’s playbook for cutting creative bottlenecks

Overview

Every marketing agency walks a tightrope — balancing the need for fresh ideas, fast delivery, and ever-changing client priorities.

For Quad, a Wisconsin-based marketing experience company, and its media arm Rise, a Quad agency, those competing pressures were growing fast. Rising client demands and expanding internal workloads made it harder to move quickly while maintaining quality.

Rise’s leaders knew automation could help, but not just any automation.

“We’ve always been focused on operational efficiency,” said Andrew Boylan, Group Director of Product Management at Rise, a Quad agency. “Even with existing robotic process automation we knew there was more opportunity to take more tasks off our teams so they can be strategic client partners. That’s what got us interested in Cassidy.”

That curiosity turned into action. What began as an experiment soon turned into a platform that helped Rise reclaim time, sharpen strategy, and scale smarter.

Where Cassidy Stepped In

Rise’s journey with Cassidy started by testing one of its most time-intensive challenges: RFP responses. The process had become a major bottleneck. Teams were spending hours digging through old files and emails for every request, often under tight, 24-hour deadlines.

Cassidy provided a faster, smarter way forward.

“When we got to see the power in Cassidy, we realized there was a lot more value than we expected. The automations and integrations gave us a clear vision of how this could radically shorten many complex agency workflows.” — Andrew Boylan

Streamlined RFP Responses: From Bottleneck to Breakthrough 

Responding to RFPs claimed many resources on the Rise team, requiring employees to manually go through old files and emails for every RFP. This process often took hours for each request and had to be repeated under tight, sometimes less than a day deadlines.

Cassidy changed the game with a suite of workflow automations and AI-driven search tools designed specifically for the RFP process.

Cassidy helped Rise simplify RFP work by:

• Automating bulk uploads of RFP questionnaires, allowing teams to process multiple requests quickly
• Powering smart search to locate answers to previously addressed questions
• Guaranteeing on-time delivery, even with tight turnarounds
• Building a centralized system that made information easy to find, reuse, and update

“We used to spend countless hours just trying to locate the answers we’d already written that only needed minor rework,” Boylan explained. “Now, Cassidy makes it easy to find, customize, and submit responses quickly. The shortened RFP turnaround is a game changer. No more fire drills.”

The adoption of Cassidy’s RFP automations turned a slow, frustrating task into a repeatable, high-quality process that moved at the speed of the business.

From Exploration to Operational Change

Once Cassidy became more than a test, quickly proving itself as a practical way to automate redundant tasks and help teams focus on meaningful work, Rise explored using it to reshape some of their most critical workflows.

But as they began researching broader applications, one critical concern surfaced: data security.

Rise had experimented with public AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude, but questions about sensitive information being used to train public models made them hesitant to go further. Cassidy addressed these concerns by prioritizing privacy and giving the team at Rise full control over their knowledge base. 

“Public AI tools default to training on your data unless you change settings. This was too important to leave to training and trust alone. We needed something that took that seriously from the start and gave us the controls we needed.”

That reassurance made all the difference. Teams across Marketing, Business Development, Analytics, and HR felt confident experimenting with new ways to work — and soon, Cassidy became part of Rise’s daily rhythm, not just another tool.

From Manual Marketing Work to Smart Automation

After every marketing event, teams often get bogged down manually validating and updating contact lists. With Cassidy, those hours vanished, allowing the marketing team to focus on high-impact strategy and creative work.

Cassidy transformed Rise’s marketing operations by: 

• Automating contact management and updates after events 
• Syncing contact lists seamlessly, keeping records accurate and current
• Automatically checking for duplicates to keep databases clean 
• Enriching contact records by adding LinkedIn profiles and company details
• Improving the overall quality and reliability of marketing data 

“We used to have someone spend hours every week cross-checking event lists in Salesforce. Now it’s automated. Cassidy even pulls company info from LinkedIn to complete the records. Our teams can now focus on actual marketing instead of data validation.” — Andrew Boylan

With cleaner data and smoother processes, Rise’s marketing team could focus on higher-impact projects — the kind that drive growth. Tasks that once felt too large to tackle, like updating fiscal year start dates for more than 1,000 clients, can now be automated and completed in hours instead of days.

That same mindset of tackling tasks that once felt overwhelming carried over into how Rise approached their data and analytics.

Turning Data Into Strategy, Not Spreadsheets

Before Cassidy, Rise’s marketing analysts spent valuable hours manually exporting data from Google Analytics and building dashboards in Looker Studio.

Now, they simply feed raw data into Cassidy and get back clear insights, and trends in seconds. 

“Cassidy helps us do what would have taken multiple hours in minutes,” said Andrew Boylan. “Having AI workflows do the analysis and even generate recommendations to improve performance gets our team closer to taking action faster.”

By automating analysis, Cassidy lets the team spend less time assembling reports and more time making strategic, data-driven decisions.

Smarter, Faster, More Confident Hiring

Rise’s hiring process used to require recruiters to manually create interview questions and candidate guides for every open position.

Cassidy automated that entire process.

Now, Rise’s talent team uses Cassidy to:

• Instantly generate comprehensive interview guides tailored to job descriptions and hiring stages.
• Align interview questions with job requirements, ensuring relevance and consistency.
• Streamline recruiter workflows by automatically surfacing the right questions and competencies for every role.

“It gave our team more confidence and saved hours of prep time,” said Boylan. “Cassidy empowered us to make better, faster decisions while maintaining accuracy in the hiring process.”

Today, their recruiters spend less time creating materials and more time connecting with and vetting  the best candidates.

Support That Feels Like Collaboration

Adopting a new platform takes more than good technology. For Rise, what set Cassidy apart was how closely the team worked alongside them at every step.

From the start, Cassidy’s team invested time to understand Rise’s goals and address early concerns about data control and privacy. That trust made it easy for teams to get started — and to keep building confidently.

“The customer support experience is top notch,” said Andrew Boylan. “Multiple times a week my team is on calls where someone from Cassidy will join to assist our adoption efforts across the agency. It doesn’t feel like support. It feels like collaboration. ”

Cassidy’s approach was hands-on:

• Quick onboarding, with short demos that helped teams start building their own assistants immediately
• Weekly office hours and real-time chat, so no question went unanswered, giving the team the confidence to try new things without hesitation
• Proactive problem-solving, including joint optimizations for complex workflows

That partnership extended beyond troubleshooting. Rise’s feedback led to real improvements in the platform, such as adding time range controls for RFP responses and improving how bulk workflows are managed.

“Their responsiveness to our feedback and ability to implement new features quickly has made this a true partnership,” Boylan said. “Cassidy quickly went from a trial tool to an indispensable asset at Rise.”

For Rise, support became a source of innovation — helping every team scale faster, smarter, and more confidently.

A Future Built on Smarter Work

What began as a cautious experiment has evolved into something much bigger. Cassidy is now a core part of how every major team at Rise works and scales.

By integrating Cassidy into core workflows, Rise has:

• Reduced time spent on repetitive tasks
• Freed teams to focus on strategic, creative work
• Boosted efficiency across sales, marketing, HR, and analytics

Sales, marketing, talent acquisition, and analytics teams have all seen tangible gains; not just in efficiency, but in their ability to focus on higher-value work and make smarter decisions.

“It’s part of how we scale now,” said Andrew Boylan. “From sales to marketing to HR, we lead with Cassidy. Cassidy helps us move faster, make smarter decisions, and stay focused on what really matters to the business.”

And the innovation isn’t slowing down. Rise continues to explore new possibilities, from client-facing assistants to deeper AI-powered insights. Each new workflow adds to a foundation of smarter, more scalable operations.

For Rise, AI isn’t just about saving time. It’s a foundation for a system that adapts, evolves, and empowers people to do their best work, today and tomorrow.

Schedule a demo to learn more about Cassidy today. 

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