Bid teams love process. We like to think of process as our safety net: checklists, reviews, colour teams, compliance matrices. We built these systems to help us win, right?
Most proposal processes were built to survive corporate politics, not to win deals. And today, those beloved workflows are dragging us backwards.
We’re seeing our world change quickly, and our processes need to change with it.
You’re now operating in a world where:
Response timelines are far shorter
Buyers expect personalisation
AI can draft most of the response in seconds
Yet most proposal teams are still working like it’s 2021, kicking off with 30-slide decks, chasing SMEs across Slack, running content through four colour reviews “just in case”, and manually updating a knowledge base that nobody trusts.
The process we built to win is now the reason we lose. It’s part of the reason burnout is baked into our profession and we’re seen as a cost centre. Our processes are fundamentally based on the belief that humans have to touch everything.
They don’t.
Let me be blunt: if your process starts with “assigning questions” and ends with “finalising formatting,” you’ve already lost. You’ve designed your workflow around human bottlenecks in a world where AI is fundamentally doing much of this work better than we are.
So no, this isn’t about “optimising” – it’s about replacing the entire operating system.
Here’s what that looks like:
Kill waterfall timelines.Build agile pods that can adapt as new info arrives.
Stop chasing SMEs.Let AI generate first drafts and give SMEs structured prompts to react to, not blank boxes.
End the review theatre.Reviews should fix logic, tone, and risk, not approve font size or rewrite AI’s grammar.
Forget tagging KBs.Use retrieval-augmented generation to surface answers in context.
Redefine quality.It’s not about polish or internal consensus, it’s about clarity, speed, heavy personalisation, and buyer relevance.
The proposal process we inherited was built for control. The one we need now must be built for trust, adaptability, and AI-first execution.
It’s not enough to “add AI to your process.” You need to burn the old one down and rebuild it around what AI can now do in seconds. Because what got us here won’t win what’s next.
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