The best bid software in 2026 reduces effort, not quality!
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been quietly transforming the way organisations respond to bids, proposals and due diligence questionnaires. In 2025, 68% of proposal teams were already using generative AI to assist with responses, a figure that more than doubled from the previous year. Attitudes have shifted as well as two-thirds of teams now feel positively about using AI. The momentum is clear, but what does this mean for 2026?
The promise of AI is not to replace humans. It is to remove the tedious, repetitive tasks that slow teams down. When AI handles requirement extraction, content matching and first draft generation, people can focus on strategy and storytelling. Research shows that sellers using AI save 1.5 hours per week on research and administrative tasks, while automation allows 64% of reps to reclaim one to five hours weekly. For proposal teams, that reclaimed time translates into higher-quality submissions and more opportunities pursued.
Generative AI’s ability to draft from a knowledge base has matured rapidly, but not all “RAG” is the same.
Traditional retrieval augmented generation is typically a fixed, one-pass workflow. It retrieves a set of content and then generates a response. In complex bids, that can still leave gaps, miss requirements, or pull in the wrong supporting evidence if the first retrieval is not quite right.
Answertree uses agentic RAG. This is a goal-driven, iterative approach where the system loops until the objective is met. Instead of retrieving once and writing once, agents can plan the steps needed, refine searches, check their own output, and keep going until the response is properly grounded in the right sources.
In practice, that looks like this: the agent reads the question, identifies what evidence is missing, searches the knowledge base, pulls supporting artefacts, checks for conflicts with previously approved answers, then drafts a response with citations back to the source material. The result is a first draft that is not a generic template. It is a personalised, compliant starting point that reviewers can trust, including support for completing complex tables and fields where appropriate, with the source references alongside.
One of the most powerful applications of AI is compliance. Manual version control and fragmented libraries often lead to outdated clauses, inconsistent messaging and audit headaches.
Answertree centralises approved answers in a secure, ISO 27001 certified library and maintains an audit trail of edits. Auto versioning ensures the latest approved content is always used, while citations link responses back to their source.
In 2026, the bigger shift will be compliance checking that behaves more like a bid manager than a static library. With an agentic approach, the system can validate phrasing against policy and previous approved responses, detect contradictions across a document, and iteratively check for risky or outdated statements before a final output is produced. That means fewer unpleasant surprises at review stage, and more confidence that what is being submitted is accurate, current and defensible.
As global competition intensifies, multilingual proposals are becoming more common. Modern AI models can translate technical content with impressive accuracy, but quality still depends on context, terminology, and review.
Answertree supports translation with localisation prompts and review workflows, helping teams adapt responses for different regions and audiences without duplicating content. The aim is speed without losing control of meaning, tone, or compliance.
AI will not write proposals for you and walk away. It will increasingly take responsibility for the loops that slow bid teams down, coverage checking, evidence gathering, compliance validation, and consistency across large responses.
In 2026, the winning teams will be those who use AI not just to draft, but to coordinate the process around the draft. By reducing cycle times and freeing up experts to focus on win themes, AI will help you respond to more opportunities without adding headcount, while improving confidence in what you submit.
