Here’s an understatement: in the past few years, we’ve seen AI start to change the way we build technology. With the right tools, tasks that once required tedious hours of work shrink to mere minutes. Refactoring code, writing tests, and even dependency management are all becoming more tractable with the help of AI.
AI can also help engineers build more bespoke systems more quickly. John Saunders, a Vice President of Product at Power Digital, has seen this first hand.
Power Digital is a growth marketing firm with over 700 employees and a global clientele that looks for marketing solutions. Saunders leads the team that builds nova, Power Digital’s proprietary data, technology, and application platform. nova makes Power Digital’s teams more efficient, whether that’s by managing data that powers the company’s work or developing a machine learning model to forecast sales for an external client. Power Digital's clients can access some apps and insights in nova as well. nova ensures that everyone at Power Digital has access to the data and tools that they need to innovate:
“nova allows us to take things that only one or two people within the agency can do and scale it to all employees in an easy-to-understand way,” explains John.
Building all of these applications in nova from scratch would require more time than nova’s team of 40 product, design, and engineers folks could commit. But building and deploying AI applications with Retool has helped them deliver solutions faster, expanding their ability to level up the whole company.
As Power Digital grew more successful, systems that worked well to manage a few customers became increasingly cumbersome. The finance team’s contract management way of working clearly needed an update.
Every time Power Digital signed a new contract with a customer, the finance team entered the contract details into the company’s data warehouse. The problem was that after several rounds of redlining and negotiations, the final version didn’t always match the data in the warehouse. To catch these discrepancies, the finance team had to comb through 40-page contracts by hand and manually update the database when they caught a mistake. With the team managing roughly 50 new contracts each month, the process was dragging them down.
What the finance team really needed, John thought, was nova Contract AI, a new application to automate this whole process with AI: extracting data from the contract PDFs, comparing data to the database, and updating the database to match the contracts. The traditional path of developing an AI application would have required a deep dive into the complexities of machine learning, demanding extensive resources, a specialized skill set, and a significant time investment. It was hard to justify the time it would take to build this automation from scratch. The solution? Using Retool to rapidly build an application with AI functionality.
Retool makes it simple to build AI applications. Retool applications can securely connect data from existing databases and APIs to the latest large language models (LLMs) from OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere, and any other model providers. Instead of spinning up their own AI tech stack made up of many different components and figuring out how to integrate those components together, John’s nova team used Retool which combines all the tools they need in one place. Retool comes with a vector database where you can easily upload documents for automatic embedding, allows you to build workflows to ingest the data you need, and ships with AI-enabled React components to create a chat interface on top of it all with just a few clicks. John used Retool’s native connector with OpenAI to integrate models like GPT-4 turbo and DALLE-3.
To solve the contract management challenge, the nova team built a Retool app that allows finance members to upload contract PDFs in bulk, then prompt Retool’s AI tools to look for and automatically extract key financial data from the PDFs. The app compares these details to the information stored in their Snowflake instance, “nova Cloud,” then alerts the finance team when it uncovers discrepancies. The team spends their time reviewing the discrepancies and editing the data directly from the Retool app, instead of scouring through PDFs.
John also noted that Retool easily integrated into Power Digital’s existing SDLC with source control, debug tools, and testing capabilities. At first, the team wasn’t sure whether Retool would allow the level of customization needed. That changed when they “started playing around with it. That's when all the ideas really started to come into play, because it was just so easy to put something together,” says John. Not only is building in Retool fast with over 100 drag-and-drop UI components, it’s flexible. Developers can also add custom components and write business logic anywhere with JavaScript to build exactly the functionality needed to get the job done.
The new system improved the efficiency for Power Digital’s finance team. John says that the AI app delivers at a 90% accuracy rate and estimates that it saves the finance team over 50 hours per month that they would have typically spent manually checking contracts against the internal database. That’s like freeing up a whole person for a week to tackle other challenges.
The system was a big win for nova, too, because the build process was very quick. For nova, Retool changes the economics of building custom software internally and unlocks the potential to tackle more application needs of the company. “Our thought moving forward is that we can cut out a large chunk of our development time by using Retool whenever possible,” he says. “I think Retool helps us develop at least two times faster.”
That developer productivity comes with other benefits, too. Jamie Schiesel, Power Digital’s VP of Engineering, has seen Retool free her teams up to work more collaboratively. “Retool has been a game-changer for the way our teams work, enabling us to democratize development across the board. It’s not just engineers, but individuals in various roles who are empowered to build and contribute,” she shares.
Using Retool has helped the engineering team ship this AI application with out-of-the-box AI tooling. “This shift has not only drastically cut down on the time it takes to move projects from conception to completion—going from months to days or weeks—but has also seamlessly extended our capacity to innovate,” Jamie says. “Retool has enhanced our ability to quickly integrate AI into our products, making what once seemed complex, straightforward with its easy-to-setup apps and workflows.”
"Retool has enhanced our ability to quickly integrate AI into our products, making what once seemed complex, straightforward with its easy-to-setup apps and workflows."
The contract management app is just the beginning for Power Digital. For example, they’ve also used Retool to gather client feedback for the client services team.
Additionally, they’ve built an application to manage employee performance reviews for the HR team. Under the previous system, the HR team had to track the reviews employees submitted in a Google Sheet. The nova team used Retool to build a more reliable review portal, saving an estimated 1000 hours of work per review cycle across the entire company twice a year.
Up next? Moving Power Digital’s weekly check-in process—which prompts employees to rate their busyness and emotional state at the end of every week—to Retool. The new nova application will replace a SaaS product that currently costs the company about $50,000 per year.
For John, nova and Power Digital, these cases illustrate how Retool makes it easier to develop necessary business solutions at a much faster pace. He advises other engineering leaders to reevaluate their development process to see how they can ship faster. “I'm a big proponent of being very lean and going with MVPs before building giant monolithic products,” he says. “And I think Retool is potentially the best way you can build a proof of concept on a product before moving too far into it.”
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