How to Automate RFP Responses With AI
Most of an RFP answer already exists in previous RFPs. Finding it is the work.
Why this one is worth automating
Work is a good automation candidate when three things are true at once: it happens often, the rules can be written down, and a mistake is cheap to catch. RFP Responses scores well on all three in most businesses, which is why it tends to be one of the first things we build.
How the agent works
An agent that can respond to RFPs does four things on a loop:
- Watches the source — an inbox, a table, a webhook, a schedule — continuously rather than when someone remembers.
- Reads whatever arrived, in whatever format it arrived in, and pulls out the fields that matter.
- Acts according to rules you wrote and approved, writing the result into your system of record.
- Escalates anything that falls outside those rules, with the context attached, instead of guessing.
It runs inside Google Drive, Notion, Google Docs, Slack.
Step four is the one that decides whether this works. An agent with no escalation path will make a confident wrong decision rather than stop. Every agent we build has an explicit “I am not sure” route, and that route goes to a person.
Where it goes wrong
- Rules that were never actually written down. Most teams discover during the audit that two people handle the same case differently. That has to be resolved before it can be automated, and resolving it is often worth more than the automation.
- No review queue. If there is nowhere for uncertain cases to go, they get handled wrongly and silently, and trust in the system collapses the first time someone notices.
- No measurement. If nobody logged how long this took before, nobody can tell whether it improved. Baseline first.