From Process to Purpose: Automating Unnecessary Steps in the Proposal Journey

Darby:
Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in the world. My name is Darby, and I am thrilled to have you for Winning AI 2025, day two.

We are thrilled to have you join us for this next session, “From Process to Purpose: Automating Unnecessary Steps in the Proposal Journey.”

If you have any questions during the presentation today, please submit them through the Q&A function. This session also has a designated forum for ongoing discussion, collaboration, and networking.

Now, without further ado, I’ll pass the floor to our presenter today, Olivia Hardy, Director of Product Marketing and Proposal Strategy at QorusDocs. Here with her today to help moderate the chat and questions is Kelly Sichel, Senior Product Manager at QorusDocs.

Olivia Hardy:
Thank you so much, Darby. Thanks everyone for joining. I’m excited to be kicking off this first session of day two.

My name is Olivia. I’ve been working with QorusDocs since 2013. I’ve had a career in sales prior to joining QorusDocs, and at QorusDocs I’ve worked across pre-sales, customer success, customer experience, implementation, adoption, strategic bids, and proposals.

My team and I also use QorusDocs as our proposal automation and RFP response software when we respond to RFPs and create proposals. That gives me a perspective as both an active user of the QorusDocs platform and someone who has helped many others on their proposal software adoption journey.

Today we are looking at how AI can help proposal teams move from process to purpose.

AI is very good at automation, particularly automating repeatable and tedious parts of a process. But AI does not exercise judgment, care, empathy, intuition, or years of lived experience. Those are still human strengths.

The goal is not to remove people from the proposal process. The goal is to remove unnecessary repetitive work so people can spend more time on the work that matters most.

A process question might be, “Did we complete every section?” A purpose question might be, “Have we made it easy and low-risk for the customer to choose us with a clear and confident narrative?”

AI can strip away repeatable overhead and give us the headspace to choose the right deals, craft the right story, protect the business, and help the team succeed.

The real power of AI is not only one huge automation moment. It is the sum of all the small ones: the little steps that disappear, the tasks that get faster, and the cumulative value those improvements create.

In the demo, I’ll show how QorusDocs can help throughout the proposal development process, including early RFP review, bid/no-bid preparation, proposal drafting, and finalist presentation preparation.

For this demo, I’ve already set up an RFP pursuit in QorusDocs. The pursuit is the collaborative workspace where we keep the information about the RFP, the customer documents, internal planning documents, assignments, recommendations, and everything else we need to do a good job.

I’ve uploaded an RFP from a fictional company, Blue Sky. One of the first things I want to do when I receive an RFP is prepare for a bid/no-bid decision meeting with key stakeholders. To do that, we need information about the opportunity.

Using QPilot, the QorusDocs AI assistant, I can ask it to read the RFP and draft an email to my team. The email can summarize the RFP background, key requirements, evaluation criteria, and timeline. This gives me a strong starting point that I can review and adjust before sending.

Next, I can use a Smart Skill to support the bid/no-bid process. The skill uses the context I provide and asks for additional information that may not be in the documents, such as our relationship with the client, whether we have the capacity and expertise to deliver the work, and whether we can price competitively and profitably.

The Smart Skill can then generate an output based on the configured framework. This is highly configurable, so teams can align it with their own criteria, internal processes, and decision-making approach.

The important point is that AI is not making the final decision for us. It is helping organize the information, apply a consistent framework, and create a strong starting point for human review.

After the bid/no-bid process and kickoff, we can use QorusDocs to help create an RFP response template and draft response content. The goal is to accelerate the repeatable steps while still allowing the proposal team to apply expertise, refine the story, and ensure the response is accurate and fit for purpose.

Later in the process, if we are selected as finalists, we may need to prepare a PowerPoint presentation or oral presentation. We can use the completed response as context to help create a finalist presentation, pulling forward relevant information from the proposal.

This is where the compounded savings become important. It is not only about saving time. It is also about improving quality, reducing repetitive work, supporting consistency, and helping teams focus on the strategic parts of the pursuit.

Our goal is to simplify the process so proposal professionals can focus more on purpose. AI can help automate and streamline repeatable work, but humans remain in control of the output.

Darby:
Thank you, Olivia, for such a wonderful session. And Kelly, thank you for moderating. Please take a few moments to complete the session survey. We hope you all have a great rest of your day at Winning AI.