APMP AI Demo Day: Showcasing the QorusDocs Generative AI Roadmap

QorusDocs was pleased to participate in APMP’s AI Demo Day on Dec 1st, a day dedicated to discovering the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) in the bid and proposal domain. Presenters were invited to give the audience a firsthand look at the latest AI-driven solutions tailored for the bid and proposal sector and demonstrate how generative AI-powered tools can streamline processes, enhance productivity, and set organizations apart. 

We were thrilled to be invited to present the QorusDocs generative AI roadmap and walk APMP members through a live demonstration of our technology, including some practical use cases showcasing how to leverage generative AI for RFP responses and streamline the creation of pitches, proposals, and questionnaires. 

Building on success 

At QorusDocs, we've been working with AI technology for a number of years, starting with the release of our Auto Answer feature back in 2020. As we've seen AI technology evolve, we're very excited about how it will solve some of the biggest time-consuming and labor-intensive challenges our customers deal with on a daily basis.  

We've been working intensely on researching and developing generative AI technologies and building out our QorusDocs generative AI roadmap. We look forward to showing you how you can practically make use of these features.  

Platform of choice 

One of the fundamental pieces we needed to establish at the start of our generative AI journey was the choice of platform. Deciding which platform to use to provide secure and private access to our content is a critical concern of our customer base and users of QorusDocs—and we know there's been a lot of concern about this issue in the overall community.  

We’ve elected to build QorusDocs’ generative AI strategy around Microsoft Azure OpenAI because: 

1. It is a secure and private technology.
2. It doesn't make your content available to other Microsoft or QorusDocs customers.
3. It doesn't use your data for its own service or for training its models. 
4. The QorusDocs application itself is based on Microsoft Azure. 
   
   

Garbage in, garbage out 

As we were working with generative AI, it became abundantly clear that it functions just like any other algorithm: if you put junk in, you're going to get junk out. As a result, the generative AI application has to be pointed at a source of accurate facts or it will hallucinate, i.e., make up information that’s invalid and not useful.  

Hallucinated AI content in the realm of proposals and RFP responses is hugely problematic, potentially having a detrimental impact on brand reputation, win rates, and sales revenue. To mitigate risk, companies need to point their generative AI tools at a library of accurate facts and ensure the AI tool works exclusively in that area. 

Content integration 

The third area we focused on when developing our generative AI strategy was integration—integration into the primary source of content. Many QorusDocs customers, indeed many organizations in the APMP community, elect to maintain and store proposal and RFP content directly in SharePoint or Microsoft Teams.  

This decision often stems from existing investments in the organization, whether in SharePoint or in Microsoft 365 tech such as Teams. Employees are familiar with the Microsoft environment; they know how to work with it and how to upload, download, and structure content. Plus, with SharePoint, the organization has complete control over the environment.  

QorusDocs seamlessly integrates with SharePoint, ensuring we can use that content with generative AI. In addition, QorusDocs augments your content with data from other systems (e.g., CRM system), with data that's stored inside of QorusDocs itself, and with your historical usage data. The result of pulling all of this data together is that you get accurate contextual responses from generative AI.  

Microsoft Copilot at the helm 

On top of the underlying infrastructure, QorusDocs layers three primary user experiences: 

1. Microsoft Copilot integration
2. Agent-based experience
3. Embedded experience  

The first phase is integration with Microsoft Copilot. Microsoft Copilot users can access content stored in their QorusDocs libraries. They can use this powerful generative AI tool to summarize RFP documents, to rewrite content, and to find content.  

Working with Copilot is a very natural experience for QorusDocs users because we encourage writers to work directly in the Microsoft Office platform. Bid and proposal teams will be able to use their preferred Office application (e.g., Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook), the QorusDocs application, and Microsoft Copilot—all from within that familiar Microsoft Office environment.  

We're working very closely with Microsoft to make more and more QorusDocs features available directly from Copilot. If you've had an opportunity to work with Microsoft Copilot, you've seen that it is an excellent generalist tool. However, while you can do many things inside of Microsoft Copilot, it's not the most efficient generative AI tool to use when you're looking for a specific proposal, pitch, and RFP actions. 

To remedy this shortfall, QorusDocs is releasing two additional experiences that are unique to business development professionals and to proposal teams. These functions allow you to perform actions that are specific to proposal managers and writers. Notably, these experiences are available within the QorusDocs application and do not require a Microsoft Copilot license.  

Enhancing the response process with agent-based & embedded experiences  

In addition to integration with Microsoft Copilot, we'll be releasing an agent-based experience within the QorusDocs user interface, enabling you to prompt by using the context of the document you're in—along with your sources of accurate facts pointing to your SharePoint or Microsoft Teams environments where your proposal content is stored.  

The third experience we’ll be supporting is what we’re calling embedded experiences. Prompts are built into QorusDocs to get you started and you have the ability to refine the outcome. The embedded experience will be useful for a scenario like answering a question in a document when you don't want to have to prompt the AI tool over and over again; you’ll be able to pre-prompt it to answer, but you’re also able to refine and tailor the outcome. 

Putting QorusDocs generative AI into action 

Interested in a hands-on demonstration of what the agent experience looks and feels like? Want a taste of the embedded experience inside QorusDocs? Keen to learn how to best use generative AI for RFP response management? The demo our CEO, Ray Meiring, gave at the APMP AI Demo Day demonstrates: 

• How we’re leveraging Microsoft Copilot to further enhance QorusDocs capabilities. 
• Flexible integration capabilities to augment your existing investment in tools. 
• Speed to proficiency using the tools you know and love in Microsoft 365. 
• QorusDocs’ generative AI roadmap brought to life through practical use cases 

Previously only available to APMP members, join us for a glimpse into the very near future with QorusDocs.  

Want to discover more about how AI-powered proposal management software can transform your RFP response and pursuit processes? Learn more about QorusDocs Generative AI for RFP responses, pitches, and proposals, including our AI for Response Management video series.