Assuming A/E/C marketers embrace AI-assisted proposal development in the next few years, I have a prediction:
We will send out a lot more RFP and RFQ responses.
Why? Because we will be able to. AI will grant the wish that some professionals have been whispering ever since they started worrying about winning new business:
Can't we just chase everything?
There will be still be other reasons to say "no," of course. Whether it's strategy or client or staffing—but "the marketing team is too busy" will no longer be one of them.
Some argue that the coming differentiator is an AI-powered world will be continuing to create things by hand, with only minimal AI assistance. I don't think that's wrong—I just think that most of us won't have the chutzpah to take that tack right away. I can imagine a backlash to the AI-powered proposal after a few years, where reviewers begin to favor submissions that were clearly hand-crafted.
But until that backlash, let's acknowledge something:
It's not as if our proposal development process isn't already partly automated: project page templates, recycled resumes, language cribbed from past proposals, boilerplate text about process.
AI presents the final leap in automation, and once the tools are widely available (and specific to A/E/C marketing), it will be hard to resist the siren song.
After all, even the greenest marketing coordinator in our industry understands that the capacity for efficient response development is a critical function of a successful marketing team.
Assuming that your firm is qualified, "cold" responses to public RFPs and RFQs (where you have no relationships) is a numbers game. We have all been short-listed for and even won projects this way.
If AI allows our marketing team to scale the number of responses we send out and increase our overall number of wins (even if the win rate goes down), then the answer from a business perspective is obvious.
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