RFP Analysis and LLMs: How AI Changed the Game

Whether your team is getting a flood of inbound RFPs or chasing every outbound opportunity, there’s one bottleneck that often presents itself: RFP analysis and response.

Now, you’d think more RFPs mean more opportunities to grow new business relationships and increase revenues.

But if you’re managing your RFPs manually, you’re likely overextending your teams and getting bogged down in paperwork. This will inevitably lead to missed opportunities, missed deadlines, and an overworked, exhausted team.

Not the outcome you’re aiming for.

Fortunately, AI and LLMs can help with analyzing proposals so you can streamline your RFP process. Industry leaders like WalkMe and Deliveroo have adopted this approach, saving time and money while ensuring employees are free to dedicate their energy to relationship-building and closing deals.

What RFP Analysis Typically Looks Like

Traditionally, responding to a tender takes way too much time. It often means reading through a mind-numbing amount of information, and it is a really tedious process. You have to sift through the lines to find things like:

• Requirements
• Timelines
• Qualifications
• Dealbreakers
• Special Instructions

This can take hours and it can be an overwhelming amount of information for most to find, interpret, and include in a questionnaire.

Beyond that, the response team often has to create compliance matrices and seek out subject matter experts (SMEs) for help with specific questions. Then, the waiting game begins, because you know those SMEs aren’t simply waiting around to serve your sales team 24/7.

With all the information your sales team gathers, they then have to prepare summaries of answers they’ve received and found among company files.

And all of this is just the analysis phase that occurs before the actual writing begins.

Where LLMs Work Best for Proposals

AI is an ideal tool for many things, including:

• Absorbing large amounts of information. So, scanning an RFP to identify key requirements can take seconds, whereas it would take a human hours.
• Organizing the information needed to respond. Wether that be your internal company documents, public knowledge, or previous responses – an LLM can greatly reduce the time it takes to research.
• Identifying questions and providing text-based answers in a short amount of time. This is by far the biggest impact as it removes the mind-numbing work necessary to complete a first draft.

Remember, LLMs are very straightforward and prepared to follow commands. They’re great for 1:1 communication, where you can ask a question and get a direct answer.

With an entirely manual workflow, the process will look like this:

However, when you use an AI RFP tool like 1up, the process will look more like this:

Areas LLMs Might Underperform

An RFP response is often "more art than science." We still need human oversight to help with the more artsy aspects of the RFP. This relates directly to vague language, intent, reading between the lines, and handling legal nuance.

For example, AI will often miss implications and allusions to your competitors, which means you’ll need a SME to parse through vague language. Sometimes an RFP will lay trap-setting questions just to compare you with another vendor. Only your team can identify something that nuanced.

Generic LLMs will also struggle with:

• Generating honest responses grounded in truth. Without a solid, reliable knowledge base in place, most LLMs are just tossing out answers. If your chatbot is pulling info from the internet, you’re rolling the dice on accuracy. No central source of truth = no real way to trust the response.
• LLMs just predict what words should come next in a sentence. So even when the response sounds right, it might be totally made up. And unless someone fact-checks it after the fact, there’s really no safeguard to catch it. You have to verify, or else or else, you're at risk of your model “hallucinating," making things up that looks legit but isn’t.
• Working with an LLM can actually make RFP response collaboration harder. Your team cannot all work together within a generic LLM. Chatbots are a 1:1 experience, not a shared workspace.

What you’ll need to do, then, is to upload your RFP to the LLM for initial analysis and then back that analysis up with a higher-level review of the material.

In the end, you’ll still potentially save days of extra work because you’re now reading through summaries and only referring back to the original, much longer document when you notice something’s off.

Right now, no AI tool can reliably pull out themes, spot scoring criteria, or flag a client's real priorities in an RFP.

These documents are just too long, messy, and full of nuance. AI might skim for keywords or give you a rough summary, but it won’t catch vague sections, contradictions, or what’s actually important beneath the surface.

You still need humans for that, for now.

How AI Makes RFP Analysis Better (and Faster)

While you’re free to use any old LLM as a tool for generating responses, they don’t compare to RFP software specifically designed for the task.

That’s where an RFP tool like 1up enters the scene, which are perfect for high-stakes RFP tasks.

Instead of simply uploading your RFP to a generic LLM tool and asking for what you want, 1up, offers an AI system designed for this type of work. We simplify your RFP process down to:

1. Upload your RFP and choose your preferred answer sources. This is critical to ensuring high-quality accurate responses grounded truth.

2. 1up will analyze the proposal requirements BEFORE automating, determining key criteria for the response and where the answers should come from.

3. 1up will extract relevant info that you connected and automatically generate answers on your behalf.

4. You review the response and make necessary edits which 1up will continuously learn from. Corrections are automatically saved to your Knowledge Base to improve future responses.

5. Need help with a response? Assign it to your teammates for review. Click “Assign” and choose a teammate. 1up makes it easy to collaborate with teammates to craft the perfect response.

RFP tools like 1up will connect to your company’s knowledge base and unify all of your company data on a single platform. For example, you can automate answers using a mix of sources such as:

• Your company website or API docs
• Confluence, Notion, SharePoint, or Google Drive Files
• Previously completed questionnaires

And, it's trained to limit its knowledge to only that of your company, so it will only pull data from your company files and your past responses. So, you never have to worry about hallucinations.

1up also creates a collaborative workspace, so your entire team can work together on a single response.

Tools like 1up also cuts out the manual work and gives a single, clear answer per question. You’ll never deal with vague answers or missing context. If a question is unclear, 1up will flag it for your team to review.

Closing Thoughts

Overall, LLMs have really amazing capabilities that can benefit most people.

LLMs are actually changing how teams handle RFPs. They’re quick – way quicker than people at scanning long documents and pulling out the stuff that matters. Instead of spending hours figuring out what’s being asked, you’re looking at summaries and actual requirements almost right away. That kind of speed alone can save a load of time.

Then there’s the whole trust factor. Most LLMs sound convincing, but if they’re pulling random info from the internet, you’re going to get answers that seem solid but aren’t grounded in anything real.

And finally, RFPs aren’t solo work. That’s one area where generic tools fall short. You can’t really loop in legal or product or whoever else in. It doesn’t work like that. You need something that lets people actually work together, in the same space, seeing the same thing.

So, having a specialized software like 1up can help with this because our LLM takes knowledge exclusively from your internal knowledge base and provides a collaborative workspace.

Ready to learn more? Book a demo today, and we’ll show you just how much time, money, and energy you can start saving.