Case studies / Professional services
Case studyA proposal assistant built on approved content
An engineering consultancy gave bid teams an assistant that drafts from approved, current proposal content only, with a source link on every answer and outdated material retired.
Overview
An employee-owned engineering and environmental consultancy of around 1,400 people, with offices in the UK, Ireland and the Gulf, bidding for public infrastructure and private development work.
Scale. An archive of some 40,000 documents, including past proposals, CVs, project sheets, method statements and policies, spread across shared drives and team sites.
The challenge
Every bid started with a hunt. Consultants searched shared drives for a similar past proposal, copied sections across and edited them under deadline. The best material was often hard to find, and what turned up first was frequently out of date: an old safety policy, a CV for someone who had left, a project description with superseded figures.
The bids team spent hours correcting these errors in final review, and some slipped through. On one occasion a submission included an expired accreditation certificate, which the client noticed. Win rates were holding, but the cost of producing each bid was rising.
Partners were interested in AI drafting tools but worried about two things: an assistant that mixed outdated material into new proposals, and one that exposed confidential client work from one practice to another.
The solution
Consultants ask the assistant for what they need in plain language: a summary of our flood-modelling experience in Ireland, a method statement for ground investigation, three relevant project sheets for a hospital car park. It searches the approved library, drafts a response and shows the documents behind each part, so the consultant can check and adapt it.
Access follows the firm's existing permissions. A consultant in the transport practice cannot retrieve confidential material from a private development client in another practice. Practice-level content owners decide what enters the library and receive a monthly list of documents approaching their review date.
Each answer can be rated, and low ratings are reviewed. Retirement is built in: when a policy, certificate or CV is superseded, the old version is withdrawn from the index the same day. The assistant is available in the firm's chat tool and links to opportunity records in the CRM, so bid teams can see related past submissions.
The engagement
- Five months
- Four specialists, with a working group from bids, knowledge management and IT
- Content selection and clean-up, indexing, team-level permissions, citation-based answers, feedback, document retirement, pilot and firm-wide rollout.
Integrations
- Document management system
- Identity service
- CRM
- Chat and collaboration tool
- Usage analytics
How we delivered it
- 01
Select and clean approved content
Six weeks
Working with the bids and knowledge teams, we defined what counted as approved: current policies, signed-off project sheets, live CVs and proposal sections reviewed in the last two years. Everything else was reviewed, archived or retired. This was the slowest phase and the most valuable.
- 02
Build the assistant with permissions and citations
Six weeks
The assistant indexes only the approved library. It inherits team-level permissions from the identity service, so confidential project material stays within the practice that owns it. Every answer it gives includes links to the documents it drew on.
- 03
Pilot with one practice
Five weeks
The water and environment practice used the assistant on live bids. We tracked drafting time, the sources cited, user ratings and the corrections the bids team still had to make in review.
- 04
Roll out and measure use
Four weeks
The assistant opened to all practices with short training sessions and a named content owner in each. Usage, ratings and unanswered questions were reviewed weekly to find gaps in the library.
Results
- Proposals drafted faster from approved material
- Content consistent across practices and offices
- Every answer linked to its source document
- Outdated material retired as soon as it is superseded
Proposal teams now reach a first draft considerably faster, and the drafts start from approved material rather than whatever turned up first in a search. The bids team spends its review time on persuasion and pricing instead of correcting stale facts.
Content is more consistent across practices. Because the library is curated and outdated material is retired promptly, errors such as expired certificates and departed staff in CVs have largely stopped appearing in submissions.
Every answer shows its source, which has made consultants comfortable relying on the assistant. Partners can see what is being used most and where the library has gaps, and new content is commissioned to fill them.
We spent more time deciding what to throw away than on the assistant itself. That was the right call: people trust it because it only knows what is current.
What made the difference
Retiring outdated documents mattered as much as adding new ones. The assistant was only as trustworthy as its library, and the clean-up did more for quality than the technology.
