Buyers are using AI to read your bid

For most of the last two years, the AI conversation in bidding has been about suppliers: should we use ChatGPT, will the buyer mind, do we have to declare it?

The other side of the table is now moving too. Public buyers are starting to use AI in their own procurement work, from drafting solicitations to comparing supplier submissions against requirements. The tools are early and humans still make the decisions. But the direction is clear, and it should change how bid teams think about quality.

What buyers are actually doing

In the United States, the Defense Logistics Agency's energy division has launched an AI request-for-proposal generator and an interactive contracting guide. The generator assembles clauses and formatting for a first-draft solicitation that a specialist then reviews and finalises. DLA Energy says this could cut a process that takes up to 30 days to as little as a week, and that wider rollout is projected to halve the time from purchase request to published RFP, from around 100 days to 50.

That tool writes the buyer's documents rather than scoring yours. Closer to home, a UK local authority worked with Telefónica Tech on a generative AI proof of value that compares provider submissions with referral requirements and produces a structured assessment, with a score and a summary explanation, to support staff in their decisions. The stated aims were less admin and more consistent assessments.

The NHS is heading the same way. Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust has contracted specialist support for the BSW procurement function to design, develop and trial AI and Microsoft Copilot in procurement operations.

Humans still score. That is not the reassurance it sounds like

None of this means a model is awarding UK contracts. Under the Procurement Act 2023, which came into force on 24 February 2025, buyers still have to explain how they reached their decisions. Procurement lawyers at Browne Jacobson have warned that relying on AI to evaluate qualitative responses would be very risky, because an unsuccessful bidder could challenge a score whose rationale cannot be clearly explained.

Government guidance takes a similar line on suppliers. PPN 017 says suppliers' use of AI is not prohibited, suggests optional disclosure questions that should not be scored, and notes that buyers may carry out proportionate extra due diligence, such as clarification questions or presentations, when AI has been used to write a tender.

So the evaluator stays human. But the evaluator's workload is changing. Once a buyer can extract requirements, compare a submission against them and get a first-pass summary in minutes, the gaps in your answer are no longer hidden by the reader's fatigue at the end of a long pile of responses.

Why padding stops working

Plenty of tender answers survive on goodwill. A tired evaluator reads "we take a robust, proactive approach to service continuity", infers that you probably have a plan, and moves on. A requirements comparison does not infer. It looks for the recovery target, the date the plan was last tested and the named owner. If those are missing, the gap is the first thing it reports.

The same goes for answers lifted from the bid library. Browne Jacobson also points out that AI-written responses to the same ITT can come out similar or even identical, which forces buyers to look for finer differences. When every supplier can produce fluent prose, fluency stops being a differentiator. Specific, evidenced, question-by-question answers are what is left.

The uncomfortable conclusion: if buyers read faster and more consistently, the quality bar for what you submit goes up, not down. Writing everything by hand does not protect you. Writing vaguely, by hand or by machine, is what gets exposed.

Five things to do before your next submission

You do not need to rebuild your bid operation. You do need to start reading your own answers the way a systematic buyer will.

• Answer the question in the buyer's order. Pull every requirement, sub-question, word limit and scoring cue out of the pack first, then check each answer covers each part explicitly. Missing sub-points are the easiest thing for a structured comparison to find.
• Replace adjectives with evidence. For every "robust", "proven" or "market-leading", ask what number, date, accreditation or case study proves it. If you cannot name one, cut the claim or go and find the fact.
• Check consistency across answers. Headcounts, response times, locations and named people should match everywhere they appear. Contradictions are cheap to detect when a reader can see the whole submission at once.
• Tailor the library, do not paste it. Reuse approved evidence, but rewrite the framing for this buyer's question and specification. Generic answers will look generic when they are compared side by side.
• Run a critical review before you submit. Have someone, or something, score each answer against the question as an evaluator would, with the instruction to find weaknesses rather than polish prose. Fix the gaps it finds with real facts, never invented ones.

Meeting the buyer at their own pace

This is the thinking behind Buyer Review in ProposAI. After you draft answers from your own evidence, a separate judge model reads them as a strict procurement evaluator would. It returns a green, amber or red readiness signal and specific findings such as missing requirements, weak evidence, unsupported claims and inconsistencies across answers. Where a fix needs a fact you have not supplied, it asks you for it rather than making one up.

It does not replace your reviewers or your judgement. It gives you the sceptical first read early, while there is still time to act on it, instead of discovering the gaps in the debrief.

Buyers are not handing evaluation to machines. But they are getting faster, more consistent and harder to impress with padding. The suppliers who do well will be the ones who read their own bids that way first.

If you want to see how your current answers stand up, you can try Buyer Review on the free plan, with no credit card. Read about Buyer Review · How it works · Pricing