Yes, AI Can Write Your Tender

Let me start with a confession.

I use AI. Quite a lot, actually.

I'm a professional tender writer, and AI has become one of the tools I use in my business. It helps me interrogate enormous tender documents, find information, explore different ways of answering questions, challenge my thinking and occasionally rescue me from the forty-seventh page of a specification when my brain has decided it would rather be anywhere else.

It's extraordinarily useful.

It's also occasionally spectacularly wrong.

And that's where things get interesting.

Because AI doesn't always look wrong when it's wrong.

Sometimes it looks fantastic.

It can give you a beautifully structured, authoritative response explaining exactly how your organisation complies with Clause 7.3.2.

There's just one tiny problem.

Clause 7.3.2 does not f**king exist.

Welcome to the age of confident bollocks

Obviously, that's an exaggerated example. Except it really isn't.

Anyone who uses generative AI regularly will eventually encounter the phenomenon politely known as a "hallucination".

I prefer confidently talking bollocks.

Because that describes the experience much more accurately.

The grammar is impeccable. The structure is logical. The language sounds authoritative. There may be headings, tables and convincing explanations.

Nothing about the answer necessarily screams:

I JUST MADE THIS UP.

And when you're dealing with a tender containing hundreds or sometimes thousands of pages across specifications, conditions of contract, response schedules, pricing schedules, addenda and attachments, that's a problem.

A fairly big one.

But surely AI can just read the tender?

Yes it can - and it's getting extraordinarily good at it.

Give AI a tender document and it can summarise it in seconds. It can identify requirements, draft responses, create tables and help you work through evaluation criteria faster than any human reasonably could.

That capability is only going to improve.

Which raises an obvious question.

Why pay a tender writer at all?

As a tender writer, it's a question I've thought about a lot.

I'm sure some prospective clients are thinking about it too. And I don't blame them.

If you're looking at a professional tender-writing fee and then looking at an AI subscription costing a fraction of that amount, having a crack yourself suddenly looks pretty attractive.

For some businesses, that will work.

But here's the bit I think we're only beginning to understand.

Writing the words was never the whole job

A good tender writer doesn't just make sentences sound nice.

We ask annoying questions.

Why have they worded the requirement that way?

Does that obligation actually apply to the service we're tendering for?

Is that requirement mandatory or desirable?

Does something in the specification contradict something in the conditions of contract?

Has the buyer accidentally referenced a clause that doesn't exist?

Does the response answer what they're actually evaluating, rather than simply repeating what they asked?

Is there a commercial risk buried on page 183 that the operations team needs to know about?

Does the pricing schedule tell a slightly different story from the specification?

And perhaps most importantly:

Does this answer actually sound like the business we're representing?

AI can help enormously with every one of those questions.

But someone still needs to know which questions to ask.

The irony isn't lost on me

I'm a tender writer using technology that could theoretically reduce demand for tender writers.

That's an interesting position to be in.

I don't think pretending AI isn't capable is the answer - because it clearly is.

Nor do I think putting "100% human-written" on everything is necessarily the badge of honour some people think it is.

I don't want to spend three hours doing something manually if technology can help me do it exceptionally well in thirty minutes.

My clients aren't paying me to type slowly. They're paying me to help them submit the strongest tender they can. So I use the tools available to me.

The value increasingly lies in knowing how to use them without surrendering your judgement to them.

AI doesn't know your business the way you do

This matters enormously in tendering.

Your business isn't just the information sitting in your capability statement. It's the conversation where your Operations Manager casually mentions something brilliant that nobody thought was worth including. It's knowing that a particular project is technically relevant but actually a terrible example for this criterion.

It's recognising that the client's proposed methodology sounds impressive but doesn't reflect what they really do. It's asking one more question because something doesn't quite add up.

And it's understanding the difference between what a business could say and what it can genuinely substantiate.

AI can help find the story - but someone has to know whether the story is true.

So, is AI coming for tender writers?

Probably some of us.

And I don't say that flippantly.

The part of tender writing that consists primarily of turning supplied information into polished prose is increasingly automatable.

I think pretending otherwise would be ridiculous. But I also think the profession is changing rather than simply disappearing.

The value is moving away from writing and further towards analysis, strategy, judgement, interrogation and quality assurance.

Maybe the tender writer of the future isn't primarily a writer at all.

Maybe we're the person sitting between the business and an incredibly powerful technology saying:

"That's useful."

"That's irrelevant."

"We need more evidence for that."

"You've misunderstood the requirement."

And occasionally:

"There is no Clause 7.3.2. Where the hell did you get that?"

And then deleting three magnificent paragraphs.

I can live with that job description.