Responding to tenders and RFPs is a business process that often flies under the radar, missing out on the recognition it deserves. Yet, every year, it determines the awarding of billions in public and private sector contracts. In industries such as construction, consulting, and technology, it’s often the primary route to market.
Despite the volume of business riding on it, bid management has been slow to evolve. There are too many manual processes – and tools that no longer match the scale and complexity of the task.
Now that’s starting to change; AI and, most recently, agentic AI is driving transformation by streamlining routine activities, simplifying collaboration and surfacing insights for better decision-making.
Rising complexity
The changes could not be more needed because the pressure on bid teams is intensifying. Tenders now run to hundreds of pages and are packed with more complex requirements than ever. Compliance demands keep growing. And more questions now call for specialist input – from detailed legal and financial clauses, to assessments on environmental and social impact.
Increasing opportunities
At the same time, the opportunities are increasing. In the UK, where over £350 billion is spent on public procurement, the number of government tenders has shot up by 28% in three years*. And more private companies are adopting RFPs and tenders as they try to cut procurement risk in an uncertain economy.
On top of that, new regulations, such as the UK Procurement Act, are encouraging more companies to participate in public tenders. A UK government policy note has advised procurement teams to plan for a surge in submissions, as suppliers are now expected to use AI to support their bids.
An outdated status quo
Yet, many bid teams are still operating in the old way. They’re wasting countless hours reading and summarizing tenders and compiling submissions manually, much of their time spent chasing experts in their organisations to help answer questions.
They are copy-pasting text that’s scattered across email, WhatsApp, Slack, and Teams – and coordinating activity using spreadsheets. Ensuring that all the right people are involved, providing their specialist input and working to the required deadlines is a constant challenge.
The result is hours of tedious, error-prone work, with little time for developing winning bid strategies or themes.
The risk of mistakes is high; key requirements can be overlooked and deadlines breached. Companies miss out on valuable contracts that could have secured years of steady revenue.
The role of AI-driven platforms
Dedicated bid and RFP management tools underpinned by AI are helping to streamline processes and improve win rates.
Early in the bid cycle, AI can help drive better bid/no-bid decisions, ensuring companies invest time and resources only in opportunities they have a realistic chance of winning.
AI agents can review tender documents running to hundreds of pages in minutes. They can summarize key requirements and identify compliance gaps, legal hurdles, or other challenges based on previous decisions.
In this way, AI can provide a more accurate assessment of the likelihood of winning than a traditional tender review. The end result is fewer hours wasted on low-probability bids, freeing up resources for those where the odds of success are highest.
Agentic collaboration
Next, instead of forcing bid managers to spend time allocating tasks, coordinating activity and chasing people to ensure work gets done, AI-driven platforms are centralising all workflows and processes into a single environment. AI agents can map what’s required for each tender and automatically assign the right experts, sending reminders to ensure tasks are completed on time.
In some cases, agents will draft answers for experts to refine. Those drafts will only get better as the AI learns with each use.
Anyone on the team can look up a specific part of a tender or RFP and instantly see who’s been assigned to it and what the current status is.
In this way, AI can transform what was once a chaotic scramble of emails and spreadsheets into a structured workflow. Resulting in less wasted time, fewer errors, and better, more reliable bids.
Continuous performance improvement
Another significant contribution is AI-driven post-bid analyses. By allowing companies to learn from past submissions, AI can help identify what changes are needed to improve win rates.
Public sector contracting authorities are legally obligated to provide post-award feedback to bidders, while many private sector organisations also make it available on request.
Too often, however, this information remains buried in emails or WhatsApp threads because companies never have the time to document and analyse it. AI can help with this by automatically structuring feedback into data points and extracting insights that support continuous improvement.
How many bids did we lose in the last quarter and why? Where did we score lowest in the last five submissions? And which type of bids or requirements do we always struggle with? Insights like this can help bid teams improve their performance over time.
Conclusion
AI is turning bid management from a stressful admin burden into a focus for strategic advantage. For businesses, this can mean achieving higher win rates with increased efficiency. For bid teams, it means less time chasing experts or copy-pasting information and a greater focus on developing winning strategies. With the number of tenders and RFPs increasing and contracts worth billions hinging on their outcome, this transformation could not be more timely.
*Based on data from FTS (Find a Tender) https://www.find-tender.service.gov.uk/Search
About the Author
Matthijs Huiskamp is the founder and CEO of Altura, a software platform that modernises how organisations manage complex RFPs and tenders — from qualification to submission. After seeing first-hand how fragmented tools slow down bids and dilute accountability, Matthijs launched Altura to bring clarity, collaboration, and measurable performance to proposal teams.
About Altura
Altura is a collaborative AI platform for bid management, designed to help teams work smarter together and win more. By connecting knowledge across sources and subject matter experts, Altura transforms how organisations discover opportunities, qualify bids, and craft winning proposals. Trusted by leading companies in technology, professional services, and construction, Altura enables teams to scale output, reduce workload, and improve win rates. Founded in 2021 in the Netherlands, the company has rapidly expanded across Europe and the UK, with offices in Amsterdam and London.
