AI discussion can feel like a bit of a minefield. While some people are giving handy tips on how AI can win you bids, others are warning that those very same tips might ruin your chances. We’ve heard AI characterised as everything from a silver bullet to an unwelcome distraction from what really matters, and everything in between. So, who do you believe?

We interviewed four experts about their perspectives on where AI has come from, where it stands, and where it’s going: Dr Mark Keane, Michael Lee, Arvind Sinha and Marc den Hertog. Informed by decades of experience each, our experts spend a lot of their time and effort thinking about, talking about, and using AI.

We discussed with them how AI can help your bid and proposal efforts, how it can hurt them, how long we’ve got before it outsmarts us, and what you can do right now to future-proof your teams.

This article is just a teaser for the wealth of knowledge and insight our experts can offer on AI. If you want to hear more from them, you’re in luck—they’ll all be speaking at BPC Dublin next month! Click here to register for the event and to hear their sessions (there will be some sneaky previews of those sessions at the end of this article, so stay tuned!).

 

Meet the experts

 

Dr Mark Keane is the Chair of Computer Science at University College Dublin. He originally trained in psychology, having completed a PhD on creativity and analogies in scientific thinking; however, when everyone started building computer programs in his field in the 1980s, Keane retrained in AI. Now, he works with something he calls “explainable AI”, which he describes as “using AI methods to elucidate how AI models work internally”.

Michael Lee is the CEO of BWL Group. He worked in bidding for years before, by his own admission, the work became “very repetitive” for him, and he turned his attention to augmented AI. Now, he’s developing AI tools to support bid and proposal efforts, the latest being a tool called AI Contract Finder, which integrates data from national procurement portals so that users can type in the services they provide and instantly receive a detailed response and list of contracts.

Arvind Sinha is the Bid Director at Eviden. Originally an electrical engineer, Arvind “graduated into the world of advanced computing and finance” and now works in preparing bids, creating proposals, estimating pricing, and negotiating contracts with clients. While he describes bids and proposals as his “bread and butter”, he says that all areas of his expertise are “immensely supported by different models of AI”.

Marc den Hertog is a self-described “creative at heart” who currently works in copywriting, bid writing, and creative direction. He came up through the creative advertising industry and transitioned into bidding when he became a business owner and had to bid for government contracts.  For 20 years, he has created concepts, campaigns and communication tools.

 

How is AI helping bid and proposal professionals?

 

AI use is becoming more and more widespread within our field. In fact, Loopio’s 2025 Trends Report found that more than two thirds of RFP teams were using generative AI last year, compared with the 34% reported in the 2024 iteration of the report. But where do our experts see the most value in using AI?

Performance improvement

Sinha talks of how AI can be particularly helpful for analysing your organization’s legacy data and explains how his team uses it to recognise patterns in lost bids to identify areas for improvement.

“When we don’t win a proposal, we try to find where the problem is, and that’s something AI can help us with,” he says. “We feed 30 years of our legacy data to the AI engine and ask it to run that. It gives us a huge list of things that we consistently need to work upon—areas where we’re likely to fall short of client’s expectations—so we can put our focus on those.”

Sinha highlights how using AI in this way can save time by exacting areas for improvement to facilitate the precise allocation of resources. For example, he explains, if the AI tells you that you are consistently missing the mark on showing empathy to the customer, you can focus your attention on putting that person touch in.

“Time is money, and AI shortens the time,” Sinha adds. “If the AI feedback helps me identify my core areas to work on with precision, then—instead of something taking me five weeks—I can do the same thing in three. I’m cutting down on 20-40% of my time and, at the same time, improving the quality of my responses immensely.”

 

Ideation and early drafting

Discussing the creation of graphics for proposals, den Hertog talks about how AI can be a good brainstorming partner when in the early stages of translating a graphic from an idea in your head to a visual representation of that idea.

“AI is a wonderful toy,” he says. “We’re still the ones who have the ideas and can bring the content to a higher level. But now, if I think about a picture in my mind, I can describe my idea to AI and it can generate it straight away.”

He describes AI as “like having an employee that doesn’t complain, always delivers, and isn’t at all sensitive about feedback”, and describes how much “faster and easier” it is to be able to rely on AI for figuring out those initial ideas.

“A few years ago, I had to brief a designer to make it in Indesign or Photoshop,” he adds. “Then I’d have to wait for the result and discuss changes—and sometimes put up a fight about the direction.”

In a similar vein, Keane talks about how AI can be a useful tool for turning your basic structure into a first draft.

“If you bring to it a high-level structure, and you abstract what you think the essence of a good proposal is and describe it to the system, then it can fill in the details,” Keane explains. “You’ll always have to know whether those details are correct or not, but you can cut down the time it takes to create a bid.”

 

Research and pipeline creation

Lee talks about how AI can help you to build your contract pipeline.

He references his own tool, AI Contract Finder, explaining how he can now use that tool to “pull up every relevant contract you can bid on, create 12-month pipelines, and show you exactly which contracts your competitors have won, including the contract values.”

While such research might normally take hours (or even days) and take several of your staff members away from more strategic focus areas, he says that using AI means all of this “happens in seconds”.

 

How is AI hurting bid and proposal professionals?

 

Of course, as with any rapidly-evolving technology, AI is not without fault. Our experts share their warnings to AI adopters about the limits of generative AI.

There are unseen holes in AI’s intelligence

Of course, we probably all have those stories of ChatGPT making things up or misunderstanding basic knowledge—take the viral ‘how many Rs in the word strawberry’ argument, for instance—but Keane explains that there is a deeper technical issue in these ‘AI fail’ anecdotes.

“LLMs have real problems in planning and reasoning, and there are all these holes in their knowledge that people don’t really know about,” he tells us. “These models are learning knowledge over text, and there are more things in the world than are described explicitly in text. That’s why AI sometimes makes these weird mistakes.”

He tells us that the danger of these models is that, even when the model does something we ask it to, we don’t always realise that “it’s doing it in the wrong way”.

“People will say AI can do something,” Keane adds. “But when they really analyse it in detail, they realise that it’s not actually doing it. Sometimes it’s just finding something that happened to be the right answer.”

 

AI-generated content trends towards the generic

Lee reminds us that generic content isn’t what your evaluator is looking for.

“I’ve seen bid teams submit AI-generated content that’s obviously repetitive and superficial,” he says. “Evaluators can lose confidence in a proposal if it feels like it has no human touch. That can cost you the bid.”

Den Hertog agrees, adding: “The human spark is what separates us from AI. There may be a time in the future where AI graphics become indistinguishable from human ones, but not right now.”

 

Is AI smarter than us?

 

Of course, we have to address the elephant in the room—are our jobs in danger? What if AI takes over the world and leaves us ruing every day we’ve been a bit snippy with ChatGPT?

Thankfully, our experts all seem to agree that humans remain smarter and more creative than AI. However, as den Hertog says, “the question is: for how long?”

“I do worry that, in the future, AI will become my competitor,” he says. “That’s why I have to evolve and stay a step ahead.”

Sinha expands a little on this fear, maintaining that AI is “not yet” smarter than people, but adding that advances in quantum computing may see that change.

“It’s hard to future-proof,” he explains. “You can’t hold the future back. When the enormous computing power of a commercial quantum computer starts using AI algorithms, ours might be a different world then. Humans are intrinsically hopeful, motivated and positive, though. So, we will find our own way around it.”

Keane takes a more confident stance on the human touch, stating that he “can’t see people ever becoming redundant”.

“People are saying AI is cleverer than you and me, and I think that’s absolute rubbish”, he adds. “With AI, you get the average stuff, but your proposal doesn’t depend on the average stuff. You still have to come up with that novel bit that wins you the money.”

 

So, what should you be doing to keep up with AI?

 

It’s all well and good to be aware of AI—to understand what’s good and bad about it, and how to keep it on side in the unlikely(?) event of a robot takeover. But what do we do—right now, today—to future-proof ourselves and our teams?

Train your staff

For Lee, it’s all about preparation.

“Core bidding skills, like writing, may not remain critical in the same way they are today, and teams need to adapt,” he says. “That’s why we’re upskilling our staff; some have gone to Harvard Business School as well as taking new AI courses, so they’re ready for whatever comes next.”

He adds: “If an inexperienced staff member generates content with AI but doesn’t have the professional expertise to evaluate it, the final product might be generic or inaccurate. We must train our junior professionals properly.”

Don’t trust AI too much

Keane warns that AI-generated content needs to be carefully reviewed.

“You need to vet the stuff you get from these models because there will be rubbish in there,” Keane says. “It’s funny sometimes, because ChatGPT will just start lying to you. It says incorrect stuff, and when you call it out for being wrong, it just kind of says, ‘Yeah, I know—sorry!’. It didn’t know anything about the topic, but that didn’t stop it making stuff up.”

Keep the humanity intact

Den Hertog cautions us to preserve the humanity in graphics.

“Be careful and make it real,” he says. “Graphics have to be genuine to make an impact, and AI still does not produce the quality we as humans can make. If we rely solely on AI and make it the benchmark, we get AI quality and not human quality. We have a responsibility to prevent that and keep it real.”

Keane agrees, stressing that we need to start moving towards an “active interaction with AI”.

“I’m starting to see the same stuff all the time,” he says. “There’s a regression towards the average. If you rely on it too much, you’re just going to do proposals like everyone else’s proposal.”

Make sure you have clear AI processes in place

Lee tells us that it’s vital for companies to have a “clear process for reviewing AI, assessing risks and understanding opportunities”, dubbing the existence of these processes “basic best-practice business management”.

He reminds us that, while he’s heard many claim they “don’t work with AI”, AI is already integrated into many everyday tools, even if we don’t realise it.

“The moment you type in Microsoft Word or send an email in Outlook, AI is involved,” Lee says. “If you haven’t set up governance to manage these new tools, you risk losing out, especially in bid management.”

Be creative in how you use it

“AI has immense utility in every aspect of our lives,” Sinha says. “Education, healthcare, art, science, agriculture, commerce, space, sports—you name it and you will find a use for AI. The basic principle remains the same, all that changes is how we use it on those specific applications.”

He adds that, with AI, we have to “go step-by-step, train ourselves and make modifications”, because “one size never fits all”.

 

Why is it so important to continue to learn about AI?

 

We know there’s a lot out there about AI right now—so why should you pay attention to more conversations about AI?

Well, for one—as Lee says—AI is expanding at a seemingly exponential rate.

“A lot of people don’t grasp AI’s potential or its risks,” he says. “The expansion of large language models is so rapid that technology is now doubling every six months. Looking as far into the future as possible is crucial for understanding what will happen next and making strategic decisions today.”

Sinha says that, from the reports he’s read and the clients he’s worked with, about half of AI users are just diving into AI without the know-how to use it effectively.

“The whole world is taken by the storm of artificial intelligence and, when I read the reports, I’d say about 50% of users right now are just jumping on the bandwagon and saying that they’re AI enabled,” Sinha explains. “But for the other half—the people who are serious about AI—we have to stop and think about what’s next right now.”

 

The future is here… And it’s at BPC Dublin!

 

Keane, Lee, Sinha and den Hertog will all be talking at BPC Dublin this year, which takes place on the 13^th and 14^th of March. Here, our experts give you a little teaser of their sessions.

Dr Mark Keane

Session title: Cognitive Insights: Enhancing Decision-Making through Human-AI Collaboration (Plenary Session)

Session spoiler: “I’ll tell you how not to get screwed by an LLM!”

“I plan to give a rough sketch of how these models work—enough to understand why they give you rubbish sometimes and why they work other times”, Keane explains. “Then, I’ll go into looking at examples of how these models might help you with writing and text.”

Michael Lee

Session Title: The Top Five Things You Should be Doing Right Now to Prepare for the Increased Use of AI in Your Organisation

Session spoiler: “I’ll offer a detailed roadmap for those seeking to harness AI effectively!”

“We’ll look at how AI aligns with a business strategy, how to develop AI business plans, identify use cases, and analyse available software,” says Lee. “Once you know where AI will be most effective, you can integrate it into your training frameworks.”

Arvind Sinha

Session title: Generative AI Techniques for Knowledge Management and Information Gathering

Session spoiler: “I’ll talk about how to guide AI rather than having it guide us!”

“My session will take five critical areas in the bid management process and explain how AI can help in each of those areas,” says Sinha. “My session is going to give a perspective according to my knowledge as a conscious AI professional, related to bid management and knowledge management, which are my bread and butter.”

Marc den Hertog

Session title: Unlock the Secret to Winning More Bids: AI & Graphic Design Strategies That Seal the Deal!

Session spoiler: “Do you want to win a proposal? Or do you just not want to lose?”

“My session will be about how AI and graphic design can help you make better bids and win more bids,” says den Hertog. “It’s an interactive session where I will share some practical strategies that I use, talk about my experiences of graphic design and finding creative solutions in the bidding process, and share my predictions.”

 

APMP’s BPC Dublin is an event dedicated entirely to the profession of bid management. Bringing together experts, thought leaders and innovators from across the world, this forward-thinking conference focusses on the future of bids and proposals and what you need to do to stay ahead. Join us for two action-packed days of in-person sessions dedicated to professional development, networking, and actionable expert advice. REGISTER NOW!