The AI revolution has hit pitching. It’s changed everything… and nothing. James Lumley finds out more.
For years, government frameworks asked bidders a simple question. Have you used a consultancy to help with this? Daryl Saunders, Head of Pitching and Client Intelligence at Bird & Bird, reckons he knows what that really means.
“I interpret that as being: have you outsourced your thinking really to other people? And do you know what you’re saying, promising and committing to?”
That question has now gone. “It’s been replaced with, have you used AI to generate elements of your response?”
It is, he says, the same question, just updated. But is it justified?
Ch-ch-changes
If you look at a typical pitch today, stage by stage, the answer looks clear. At every step a machine is involved in doing the work that a person used to do alone. It starts with the buyer.
While clients used to find firms through referrals and perhaps a confirmatory check of Google and LinkedIn, increasingly they are using ChatGPT or Claude, says Mary Cloonan, who runs the consultancy Marketing Clever.
This summer, an international group went looking for a conference speaker, she says. She was chosen. And when she asked the organiser why, she was told that her name came up after using AI to conduct a very specific search.
“Suppliers, including professional services firms, are now being validated by deep, very specific AI searches,” she says. If the machine cannot find you, you are not on the list.
Then comes the decision to bid.
“AI has made it possible to produce more, faster,” says Catherine Redmond, Global Senior Pitch Manager at Kennedys. “But the fact that you can bid for more doesn’t mean that you should. It actually makes being strategic about where you invest your time and expertise even more important.”
Saunders’ team is using AI to help the firm make better decisions about where to focus effort. The question, says Saunders, is: “Are we making good-quality decisions about what we pursue in each market quickly and intelligently?”
Then pitch preparation and writing.
“AI can do wonders for business development and pitch research,” says Monique Hogan, Associate Director at Grant Thornton International. “You can tell it to go off and do all the research, find all the component parts and bring them all back to you.”
It can check the pitch drafts too. Upload the RFP, upload the response and ask: “Have I answered all the questions?” she says. “It’s great at that.”
“AI is bringing efficiencies,” says Saunders. “Compliant first drafts are quicker to prepare. Anyone can now have a very polished bid very quickly,” adds Lucy Richardson, Head of Business Development at business advisory firm Menzies LLP.
And finally, the marking. Clients have started setting rules, and it’s not necessarily in AI’s favour.
“We’re already starting to see clients say, ‘Don’t use AI in the formulation of your tender responses,’” says Adele Attwood, Head of Bids at Gowling WLG.
Some clients now make bidders declare where they used it. Every bid at her firm now starts with a question nobody used to ask: can this tender go anywhere near AI?
“The whole approach is now changing,” she says.
Buyers, meanwhile, are reaching for the same tools. “We know that governments are using AI to evaluate bids,” says Redmond.
Hogan can see it coming. Some buyers already send nothing more than a simple spreadsheet. “They’ve got six respondents and they’ve got six spreadsheets. So, they’re just going to upload the spreadsheets into AI and ask, ‘How good are these answers?’, and away it goes.”
There is a danger that bidders write for the machine and the machine marks the result. “We’re at risk of getting into a vicious cycle,” says Redmond.
Found, chosen, prepared, written, judged. Every stage of the pitch now runs through a machine with efficiency morphing into dystopia.
But is that really the case?
Same as it ever was
Now walk the same stages again. At every one, a person still decides, albeit with the help of a machine.
The machine may build the shortlist. A person still picks from it. The job, says Cloonan, is to be “findable for the human that is going to buy you”.
Whilst AI makes bidding cheap, it does not make it wise.
On whether to bid, Redmond is blunt. “Nothing’s changed there.” Do you know the client? Do you have the relationships? Do you have a credible reason to win? “You’re not going to win if you’re just submitting something generic.”
Then the sting. “And if we do win, is it even what we want to win?” Richardson’s bid/no-bid framework still asks the oldest question in business development: “Is this a client worth going for?”
The machine gathers the research, but it cannot judge it, says Attwood. Redmond puts AI alongside “the axe, the printing press and the calculator”. Each made people more efficient, “but they haven’t changed that underlying skill. They’ve not replaced the expert.”
AI is not great with nuance. “When you’re talking to someone, they could be saying something, and you’re thinking, ‘Do you really mean that?’” says Hogan. “AI can’t question that because they look at the words and not what’s unspoken.”
And the shortlist still often ends in a room, face-to-face with the client. Hogan has seen firms lose by fielding what looked, on paper, like the best team. But the chemistry was wrong and the pitch went to someone else.
Both sides now
So which is it? Is AI just an axe, or is it the route to sterile, dystopian, relationship-free pitching?
Steven Lewis, a former journalist who runs Sydney intelligence agency for professional services firms Taleist, has spent years teaching people to write and think critically. And he has a firm opinion that comes down right in the centre of the argument.
“Nothing fundamentally has changed.” The firms that will succeed, he says, “are going to be the ones who use AI to amplify the stuff that is better, which is the human thought”.
The trouble is that most firms never had much to amplify in the first place, he says. Lewis set an AI loose on the homepages of the 55 law firms surveyed by the Australian Financial Review, looking for any that opened with a line about the client. It found none. “Firms talk about themselves.”
As for the AI pitching tools that are coming on to the market, he’s scathing. They are, he says, no better than “photocopiers” that update old pitches to new opportunities.
His argument is that AI, used badly, just speeds up human mistakes of judgement. But used well, it can get you where you want to go faster and better. AI is, to him, the “missing link” that he’s been wating for.
“Writers who know what they’re doing,” he says, “can train an AI to bring the rest of the team up to their standard.” On a high level, it means building a bot that enforces the structures that a good writer uses. Not making the bot do the writing.
Trained properly, the machine asks the questions a good bid writer would. What does, for example, the client actually want? A client financing a bridge in Indonesia does not want a lecture on bridge finance. It wants to know: “How are you the safest choice to reduce their risk?” With that help, the weakest writer on the team “becomes an above-average writer”.
Used well, says Lewis, AI “can make their people almost more human” because a human can train it to get the best out of other humans.
Ironically, it “could be the thing that actually makes them less robotic”.
Human judgement, says Hogan, is “not going to become less valuable. It’s going to become more valuable.” But that doesn’t mean that judgement can’t be augmented by AI.
So, for the marketer facing a partner who wants to buy an AI pitch tool, the lesson is simple. Don’t buy a photocopier. But do feel free to use tech to challenge your thinking, mark your homework, and help replicate effective thought processes across the firm.
Back, then, to that framework question. Have you used AI? Soon every bidder will say yes.
The better question is still the old one. Have you outsourced your thinking?
James Lumley, freelance journalist, corporate writer, trainer and coach. www.byline.london
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