Automate RFP Responses via AI: Reality or Marketing Myth?

Who hasn’t spent evenings or even weekends completing responses to hundreds of questions for an RFP to meet submission deadlines ?

Despite the fact that RFPs have many points of similarity from one to another, generating responses to questionnaires usually requires a manual process that includes an internal information-gathering phase for the following reasons:

• Reusing previous responses is made difficult by variations in the way questions are phrased.

• The required information is dispersed across the organization.

• Informational content is dynamic, tied to the evolution of product and service offerings, key figures, administrative documents, etc.

• There’s a lack of a collaborative approach for sharing content from previous responses.

  
  

Winning the race against time is a key success factor for any RFP response, where the main objective is for the response team to focus as much as possible on producing a highly differentiating value proposition compared to the competition.

Beyond the convenience of automating the task for the response team, the promise of AI solutions to automate up to 90% of questionnaire response production provides a real benefit for the bidder.

To date, we can consider that the maturity of private LLMs used by publishers allows for the automation of questionnaire response production or, at a minimum, provides direct access to relevant document sources for extracting information, thus meeting security and confidentiality requirements.

However, a prerequisite is to build a knowledge base that feeds the AI platform with various document sources: previous RFP responses, product & service characteristics, environmental, social, and governance (ESG) policies, company website, etc.

This knowledge base must be regularly updated and enriched over time to ensure the relevance of the proposed responses, thereby hoping to achieve an increasing rate of automation.

“Systematic innovation requires a willingness to see change as an opportunity.” – Joseph Schumpeter