AI tender writing – yay or nay?

How AI is changing the way we write responses to public tenders – for the better

We say Yay (but with a big caveat)!

There’s a common saying in tender response teams: ‘There’s nothing uglier than a blank piece of paper and a looming deadline’.

The most beneficial way artificial intelligence (AI) can help you and your team to respond to public tenders is by removing this major source of stress.

Using AI when responding to government tenders can offer several benefits that can enhance the competitiveness and effectiveness of your bid.

Here are some of the advantages:

Use AI to reduce the stress for the tender writer and the bid team

AI tender writing can streamline your tender response process by automating repetitive tasks such as document extraction, data entry, and formatting.

AI can quickly generate a generic answer to specific tender questions or requirements.

Then you can edit and customise the writing for the requirements of the project and/or solution that you are proposing.  This allows your team to focus on crafting a high-quality proposal rather than spending excessive time on administrative tasks.

You can also use AI to help you customise responses to particular project or solution requirements.

But be careful!

You will have to re-write the customised responses, because AI doesn’t know all of the particular project or your solution requirements.

Use AI to ensure tender compliance.

As well as reducing stress for the bid writers, this approach often ensures compliance. And that reduces the amount of re-writing time needed through the tender evaluation process before you submit.

Here are some ways that AI tender writing can work in tender compliance –

1. It can generate a compliance checklist based on the extracted information from the tender documents. This checklist outlines all the requirements and criteria that must be met in your tender response.
2. For numerical data, AI can perform data validation to ensure that the figures in your response match the values specified in the tender documents. This is crucial for financial and technical compliance.
3. Depending on the industry and the nature of the tender, AI can cross-reference your response with relevant industry regulations and compliance standards to ensure full alignment.
4. AI can detect common errors such as spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and inconsistencies within your response. While these may not directly relate to compliance, they can impact the overall quality and professionalism of your submission.

Use AI to calculate risk mitigation.

AI-powered tools can assess the risk associated with a particular tender. They can flag potential issues or discrepancies in the tender documents, helping you avoid costly mistakes.

Some examples of how it can be used for risk mitigation include –

1. AI can analyse the terms and conditions of the tender contract to identify any clauses that may pose risks to your organisation. This includes assessing legal and financial obligations and potential liabilities.

• AI can evaluate the financial aspects of your bid, including cost estimates, budget allocation, and pricing strategies. It can help you identify areas where financial risks may arise and suggest strategies to mitigate them.

Use AI to save time on design and graphics

AI is also helping to significantly reduce the amount of time it takes to design graphics as part of your tender responses.

Graphics save you in word count.  Remember the saying ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’? – and so helping you keep your responses within the required word count or page count.

AI can generate photos, pictures, graphs, tables, diagrams and so on. You can then take the red pen to those graphics and hand your notes to your graphic designer to complete them.

Use AI to save copy-editing time

AI tender writing can also reduce the amount of copy-editing time: AI can improve the readability of responses to make them easier for Tender Evaluators to skim-read.

But again, be careful!

Because it’s so easy – and mostly free – to use, tender evaluators like us always use AI to generate answers to the questions we are evaluating.

If your tender response looks like it has been generated by AI, then there is a good chance it will look the same as another bidder’s tender response – because they will be using AI too.

When this happens, often we can’t find any differences between your response and your competitor’s response – resulting in the same score. In other words, a tie. And so we start looking more at price or other differences to separate the tender responses. This may not work in your favour.

Use AI for quality assurance

AI can perform quality checks on your responses, flagging errors, inconsistencies, or missing information. This helps ensure that your proposal is well-structured and compliant with the tender requirements.

AI can provide suggestions and recommendations for improving your response. This may include rephrasing sentences for clarity, offering synonyms, or proposing alternative wording.

In complex responses, AI can cross-reference different sections or documents to ensure that there are no contradictions or discrepancies between various parts of your submission. It can also add internal links for easy navigation.

Use AI tender writing to analyse large data sets.

Another, and generally safer, way of using AI in tender responses is to analyse large data sets.

One recent example in our experience is that a Client issuing a tender included a very large data set of asset maintenance records.  As part of the tender, they asked tender responders to analyse and suggest maintenance programs that balanced asset reliability, asset life and minimised asset maintenance costs.

Incorporating AI into your tender response strategy can give you a competitive edge by improving the quality, speed, and efficiency of your submissions. However, it’s important to use AI as a tool to assist your team rather than replace human expertise, as the human touch is often crucial in understanding complex tender requirements and building strong relationships with government agencies.