ClickUp automates GTM operations with custom AI apps and workflows

Impact

• Automated hundreds of hours of work weekly across Sales, Support, Product, and RevOps through six custom AI tools
• Saved hundreds of thousands of dollars from additional headcount and $200k+ in vendor costs by building AI tools on one platform
• Reduced development time for production-ready custom AI tools by 7x

“Retool bridges the gap between our processes and AI. You can structure context-rich prompts, format and integrate your outputs, and put an elegant interface over it all.” — Borys Aptekar, Product Manager of GTM AI at ClickUp

Summary: Turning AI potential into business results

ClickUp↗, a leading productivity and project management platform, wanted to automate and accelerate its go-to-market (GTM) processes with AI. The team adopted Retool as their app layer, with engineers building custom tools that connect their data with AI models. The apps and workflows they’ve built have significantly improved the GTM organization’s efficiency, without adding headcount or costly off-the-shelf tooling.

Company overview

• Size: 1,200+ employees serving over 3M teams and 14M users
• Industry: Technology & software
• Regions: North America, Europe, Asia Pacific
• Retool capabilities used: Apps and Workflows
• Use cases: Automated sales inbound requests, support ticket triage automation, product feedback analysis, customer research
• Data sources: Salesforce, Zendesk, Snowflake, Perplexity, Help Center content, Reddit API, call recordings, and email client

Challenge: Bridging the gap between the promise of AI and actual business value

ClickUp’s go-to-market (GTM) leadership had an ambitious vision: an AI-powered sales and customer success engine free from the toil of repetitive manual tasks. But they learned that none of the AI tools on the market had the right data integration capabilities or customization options they needed at a cost that made sense for scaling across the entire company. Before an AI tool could automate anything, it needed to be able to bring together data from data warehouses, Salesforce, and third-party tools. Most off-the-shelf AI software vendors had insufficient integrations and customization options.

“We evaluated a lot of AI tools on the market,” explains Borys Aptekar↗, who transitioned from ClickUp’s Director of RevOps to GTM AI product manager. “Seeing the prompts they were using and the data sources they had, we realized we could build these tools ourselves and save on multiple subscriptions. We didn't want to get burned in six months when these vendors ran out of funding and shut down.”

ClickUp had the team in place to build custom solutions, but its development methods were very engineering-dependent and required lengthy processes for sandbox testing and reviews. They needed a platform that could serve as the app layer for its AI tooling—securely connecting data sources, coordinating workflows, and providing user interfaces for both autonomous processes and human reviews.

This realization led the team to explore a build-versus-buy approach with the right platform foundation.

Solution: The app layer for AI

ClickUp chose Retool to rapidly develop custom AI tools↗ for different teams in-house. ClickUp could quickly prototype and deploy AI tools to automate manual GTM work, freeing up engineers for more critical tasks and reducing hiring costs.

“With Retool, we built AI apps connected to our existing systems quickly and cost-effectively, saving substantially compared to buying point solutions,” explains Borys.

Borys’s team connected the latest AI models↗ from OpenAI and Gemini to power their apps and workflows, and built elegant interfaces that non-technical staff could easily use. ClickUp engineers and analysts could easily build apps that integrated↗ with Salesforce, data warehouses, Zendesk, and more. These connections meant ClickUp’s custom AI apps could do more meaningful work than chat interfaces and raw APIs alone.

The team quickly tested and deployed AI tools with governance features↗ like role-based access controls, audit logs, SSO, and CI/CD compliance. They could iterate on apps with live feedback in a visual drag-and-drop development environment—a significant efficiency change from the old weeks-long planning and technical discovery process. In one click, engineers could deploy completed agents and apps for end users and business processes to use.

“The time from idea to working prototype to productized workflow or app is very short with Retool. I’ve seen functional apps come back within a couple of hours of one of our engineers playing with it,” says Borys.

With this foundation in place, ClickUp began deploying AI tools across multiple GTM functions, starting with their highest-impact use cases.

Results: Multiple AI tools to automate work and reduce costs

ClickUp has deployed over six custom AI tools that have automated hundreds of hours of work.

An inbound SDR agent

The team’s first project was to automate the manual analysis, qualification, and routing of inbound inquiries. They prototyped and refined an inbound SDR agent using logic, prompts, and configuration with Retool connected to their Salesforce instance. The agent categorizes inquiries, conducts discovery conversations, answers questions, and routes leads to human support or upgrades users automatically. Human-in-the-loop oversight, built with a Retool app embedded in their customer engagement platform, ensures quality and a high level of customer satisfaction. They’ve since expanded these capabilities through Workflows↗ and Database↗, creating a powerful, interconnected ecosystem.

This custom inbound SDR agent has saved ClickUp hundreds of thousands of dollars in headcount costs. The Sales team can now generate more pipeline by focusing on outbound and other high-touch tasks.

“Instead of buying an expensive SDR agent solution, we used Retool’s adaptable platform to build out this complex use case,” says Borys. “We can own our business context and process within Retool while delivering great outcomes for our customers and stakeholders.”

Enhanced customer support

Borys’ next task was to help ClickUp’s growing customer support team scale its high-quality service to more customers. Support reps now save hours each week with an AI workflow that automates triage, duplicate detection, and escalation of time-sensitive issues. The Zendesk integration means the workflow has the essential context to help shorten average resolution times.

ClickUps’ Digital Adoption (DA) team now also uses AI tools to help customers onboard and use ClickUp. The DA team holds hundreds of calls with customers each week, and gathering the right amount of customer detail for high-quality service took time. Borys’s team built a custom workflow that aggregates customers’ company info, support ticket history, adoption metrics, and CRM notes into a single view before reps meet with customers, giving them the context needed to help customers become more successful in ClickUp. With this workflow, DA team members have the context they need for better customer success while saving two to three hours a week each time that goes to helping more customers.

Product feedback research agent

ClickUp’s product team builds features at lightning speed, but identifying what 14M+ users truly want can be challenging. Their user research platform, called “Nexus,” transforms feedback from Zendesk tickets, sales calls, G2, and Reddit into an actionable dashboard. Product managers gain immediate access to auto-categorized summaries with complete source context. PMs can also ask specific feature questions directly, eliminating hours of manual research.

The 40-person product management team uses Nexus to gain insights from customer feedback across channels. The team gets dozens of hours a week back, and more confidence in building the right features based on customer feedback.

Order Form Reviewer agent

Before Retool, Deal Desk and Order Operations teams spent hours manually reviewing order forms to verify data correctly synced with Salesforce and other critical systems. Now, a new agentic workflow extracts information from Order Form PDFs, cross-references it with data from Salesforce and internal systems, and validates accuracy. Any discrepancies trigger alerts, guiding representatives on necessary corrections for a streamlined process.

“Our Deal Desk and Order Operations teams went from drowning in manual unstructured data reviews to working efficiently—it's been life-changing," says Borys.

Building this internally saved ClickUp $200k per year in off-the-shelf automation software costs, and the team can now approve Order Forms in just a few minutes.

What’s next

These are just some of the use cases that ClickUp has delivered in a short time with Retool to automate hundreds of hours of manual work across GTM and Product. ClickUp continues to expand its agentic workforce, with new agents and AI apps for support, sales, and other teams currently in development.

Ready to see Retool in action? Get a demo↗ with a Retool expert or start building for free↗ today.

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