In today’s world, the use of AI is becoming more and more common. Procurement and bid writing are no exception. Is this a good thing? Can AI have a place in bid writing? Or, instead, should it be completely avoided? The truth is that AI definitely can support the bidding process. Nevertheless, it’s vital that you understand what it can do well and what it struggles with. While there are legitimate uses for it, AI should not replace human insight, judgement, or accountability. Rather than just letting AI do all the work (which would produce poor-quality results), the best approach is AI-enabled but human-led.

In other words, while AI can help bid teams work faster, humans are still needed to decide what will actually persuade the buyer. What does this mean in practice?

Where AI Can Help in the Bidding Process

There are many ways in which AI can be genuinely useful in bidding. One key area in which AI excels is processing large volumes of information and then summarising that information. In view of this, as well as other strengths of AI, here are the main ways that it can help in the bidding process:

Summarising tender documents – AI can process these extensive documents and summarise important points on demand.

Identifying compliance requirements – AI can search the tender documents and identify what the buyer’s compliance requirements are.

Producing outlines, checklists or response frameworks – AI can give you a checklist of the compliance requirements, an outline for a given section of the bid, headings to include, and other frameworks to develop into a full response.

Helping organise information from a bid library – AI can search through your bid library and collate the information that will be relevant to the bid.

Supporting buyer, contract and market research – AI can facilitate research into the buyer, the existing contract, or the market as a whole, by researching and summarising important documents and websites.

Reducing repetitive administrative work – AI can handle all sorts of simple and repetitive tasks, such as organising information into an Excel sheet.

The Danger of Lazy AI-Generated Bid Responses

There are some things that you should definitely avoid getting AI to do. These are things that expose its weak areas rather than allow it to play to its strengths. For instance, using AI to produce a full draft bid response, with little human input, is poor practice. While it can be effective for producing helpful outlines and frameworks, getting it to write the actual content will not produce a winning bid.

The basic problem is that AI often produces generic, polished-sounding content that lacks the detailed and specific insights that come from a human perspective. An AI-generated response will usually end up sounding like it could apply to any bidder. Since winning a bid is all about setting yourself apart from the competition, this clearly isn’t acceptable. The evaluators who will examine your bid will be looking for specific, credible, evidence-based responses, not just something that sounds slick and professional.

Making bland, generic claims and failing to clearly differentiate yourself from the competition will lead to your bid being easily dismissed. Using recycled phrasing, as AI has been known to do, will prevent your bid from standing out and weaken your credibility. Something that would definitely undermine your credibility, and could even cost you the tender, is if the AI were to include any factual errors or ‘hallucinations’. 

Why Human Insight Remains Essential

Winning bids require a level of human judgement and evaluation that AI simply cannot replace. After all, the bids are all going to be assessed by human evaluators, not by a machine. What are some things that require human involvement?

Understanding the buyer’s real priorities and pressures – A human needs to assess what pressures the buyer is under (e.g. as a result of recent legislation) and what their priorities are. While AI can help with researching and summarising information, making a reasonable judgement call still requires human insight.

Grasping complex requirements or understanding legislative or regulatory compliance issues – While AI can often provide helpful checklists of requirements, its understanding is limited.

Invaluable insights that come from meaningful business development activity – Engaging directly with buyers, attending market engagement events, and building real working relationships provide insight that an AI cannot replicate.

Choosing the right evidence and case studies – Again, this requires human insight and judgement based on what the bid team knows about the buyer’s pain points and priorities.

Developing win themes – This is a collaborative process that should incorporate input from everyone at the Bid Kick-Off meeting.

Positioning the bidder against competitors – While AI can find and summarise important information from competitors’ websites, human judgement is needed to decide how to differentiate yourself from them in the bid.

Balancing quality, price, risk and deliverability – This is a delicate balance that needs insight from numerous experts working collaboratively.

Creating a persuasive narrative – Persuasion involves more than just sounding professional. It involves crafting specific, targeted arguments built around well-selected evidence.

How to Use AI Properly Within a Bid Team

With all these factors in mind, how can you sensibly use AI within the bidding process? Really, AI should be viewed as a tool that supports the bid team, similar to how a calculator might support an accountant or a spell-checker might help a writer. Some practical examples include:

• Asking AI to summarise documents, not make final decisions
• Using AI to create a first outline, then shaping it with buyer-specific insight
• Getting AI to check clarity, consistency and compliance
• Setting human review points before submission

In other words, humans should always have oversight of what AI is doing, and AI should never be responsible for any final output that goes to the buyer. If the AI creates an outline, a human writer expands it into the full draft. While the AI may retrieve important information, the human bid team needs to decide what to do with it. And although AI may support their work, humans hold full accountability for it. Having regular review points where an AI’s work is checked over is therefore an essential feature to implement within your bidding process.

Confidentiality, Data Protection, and Governance Risks

The effectiveness of AI is not the only issue to be concerned about. If you are using AI in your bidding process, you need to give serious consideration to confidentiality, data protection, and governance risks. The inappropriate use of AI can create serious issues.

For one thing, entering confidential tender documents, information about pricing, personal data, buyer information, or commercially sensitive material into an AI model runs the risk of a major data leak. This is why it is vital to know what kind of AI model you are using. If you’re not careful, your use of AI could actually breach confidentiality requirements and data protection rules. It could also break client trust (if you are an external bid writer) or breach internal policies.

‘Shadow AI’ refers to the unauthorised or uncontrolled use of AI by company employees. This type of AI usage can lead to these very problems. This is why your organisation needs clear rules on approved AI tools, permitted use cases, prompt standards (since the quality of the prompt has a significant impact on the quality of the output), human review and information security. For example, in one recent workshop in London, 40 bid professionals admitted that their employers had no policies, procedures or guardrails around their use of AI within bidding!

AI-Enabled, Human-Led Bidding

In summary, AI can certainly be valuable in the bidding process. It can be used effectively to support tasks such as researching, summarising, and organising. Nevertheless, the bidding process cannot be left to AI. It needs to be fundamentally driven by humans. It needs to involve human judgement and buyer understanding, the wise selection of evidence and case studies, and a persuasive case built around specifics rather than generic claims.

Rather than trying to get AI to create your bid response for you, use it to give your people more time to produce a stronger, more specific, and more persuasive bid. The best bid teams will not be replaced by AI – instead, they will learn how to use it responsibly.