AI and bid writing: A blog

I quite enjoy writing. I also like talking and writing about what Engine does - and about AI and the benefits of generative AI and retrieval augmented generation. You probably guessed that. I know that not everyone likes that kind of thing, but I do. Happily, it’s not all I do. Because I also like variety, and I like having friends.

But I don’t enjoy writing bids and tenders, even though I am that person; and I don’t think anyone really enjoys it. The discussion with colleagues where you reflect on your strengths and talk about the suitability and the pitch can be fun; the sense of satisfaction that you’ve done a nice job on your tender is pretty good too. The first couple of times.

Winning is the fun bit. The rest is drudgery. Expensive drudgery.

Throughout the process of responding to an opportunity to tender for work, you keep a mental note of how much of your time you’re spending on something that could literally come to nothing and carries a very real opportunity cost*. Then there’s the ‘drafting by committee’ stage with all those contributors (shudder), and often multiple approvals, none of which necessarily brings out the best in organisational culture.

When the stakes are high, the value of the time of the people that you need to contribute is high too. You also know that what might trip you up at the next stage could be something that ultimately feels a bit arbitrary; you can’t even half-arse it lest you fail on a small detail. It’s also when you most need quick and easy access to your corporate knowledge – which is tricky if the person who Remembers All The Stuff is halfway to Courmayeur with a snowboard under his arm and you’ve only got a few working days to respond.

As a happy bonus, the process is nearly as annoying at the other end of the pipe, where I’ve spent a lot of my career: evaluating bids is quicker and easier than creating them but also repetitive and very triggering if you’re prone to the occasional lapse in concentration and unconscious bias. Which we literally all are.

We don’t like overblown sales speak in our blogs at Engine because that’s not what we’re about, but I’m going to make an exception. If this is at all familiar then using AI – specifically good, bespoke, fairly-priced, secure, retrieval augmented generation (RAG) AI – will change your life.

A day in your new life

It's Monday morning, you’re getting to the bottom of your first coffee of the day and wondering if it’s okay to have a second one straight away. An RFP** lands in your inbox but instead of feeling curiosity quickly followed by mild dread at the work involved, you think: excellent!

You open a browser tab for your in-house AI bid writer. 10 minutes later you have an analysis of all the paperwork and your suitability to the opportunity, and an outline response - which you’ve already scanned to check it’s hitting the mark.

At this point you might choose to confidently pass on this one because it’s ‘not for us’ then reward your decisiveness with that coffee, or you can commit a little bit more time to building up a rich and comprehensive response uniquely designed to the given scoring criteria using real evidence of your experience and capability. Then reward yourself with coffee while other people take a look at the first draft.

Time savings and that other really useful thing: better quality

With a bidwriter.engine – which some of our blog readers are already proud owners of - you upload an RFP – or any other information about an opportunity - to your private RAG AI with one click, and this magic begins. The AI swiftly analyses the project at hand, reviews the past proposals and any other information we’ve trained it on (sales bumf, the team’s CVs… whatever best explains what you can do), and generates responses to each question. It gives citations for the relevant case studies and methodologies, so you can check that every response is substantiated with the best available, accurate examples - even if the only person who might have remembered them all is still in the queue for the chairlift.

Use AI well and all you do is review the AI-generated proposal, make a few tweaks, and send it around for final approval. The entire process takes minutes, not hours, and you’ve still got most of the morning and that second coffee ahead of you. The rest of your day is now free to focus on looking forwards: strategy, meetings, or maybe even an early finish.

Bid writing and removing the pain points

Bid writing demands precision, creativity, and an encyclopaedic knowledge of your company’s past projects and capabilities. Let’s re-cap for folks who like a list:

1. Time-consuming: Crafting a high-quality bid response is time-consuming.

2. Siloed knowledge: Institutional knowledge can be scattered across different teams and individuals. Finding the right case study or piece of information can feel like looking for horns on a horse's head***.

3. Manual errors: With so many moving parts, the risk of errors increases. A typo here, a misplaced fact there, and suddenly your bid looks less than professional. World class GPTs and large language models don’t have that problem.

Here’s how the right AI tool can add value to the process:

1. Efficiency and speed: Hours of effort become minutes of mastery. The AI reviews RFPs, sifts through past proposals, and pinpoints the most relevant case studies instantly. Have your evening back.

2. Accuracy and relevance: The AI is also smart: it uses your company’s unique information and house style to create tailored, precise proposals.

3. Winning more business: You can respond to more opportunities, increasing your chances of success and helping maintain and grow essential revenue. And for our non-profit clients, this means more funding opportunities and making a bigger impact.

4. Ease of use: It sounds too good to be true but it is as easy as upload, read, edit.

5. Innovation and leading the charge: Using tools like bespoke AI while the competition is either dependent on manpower or using tools that produce generic answers puts you ahead of the game.

Happy bonuses

Once you’ve got an AI tool trained on your corporate knowledge, the fun isn’t limited to writing great bids quickly. You can use it to interrogate your information to create neat summaries in response to simple queries, or to help train new staff, or to translate your company information and help you go global… It’s the most patient corporate knowledge holder and stands permanently ready to answer your questions. It will never come back from a ski trip with a broken leg and need a rest.

And let’s remind ourselves once more about the bias issue: I want my bids and proposals to be looked at by AI alongside a human. I do. You should too. We also build tools that help you evaluate a tender.

Treat yourself to a secret weapon.

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* Opportunity cost: The value of the most appealing alternative you give up when making a choice. Imagine – if you can – sitting through a crowded meeting where your attendance isn't crucial. Maybe no-one needed to be there. By choosing to attend, you miss out on the opportunity to finish a crucial task or just to have headspace to solve a wicked problem. I think about this a lot. I used to be a civil servant.

** RFP: Request for proposal. But you knew that.

*** This is a Portuguese alternative to, “looking for a needle in a haystack” – because I got into a conversation with our private GPT staff engine about how best to make this point and it kept using the same simile. So I asked it which countries don’t say, “needle in a haystack”. Turns out pretty much everyone, everywhere says the same thing, just in their own language. I guess haystacks and needles are the global constant.

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